Google is no doubt the most popular search engine used by Internet consumers and it is also the most talked about company on the web. There must be thousands of web logs of so-called SEO specialists, who know all about algorithms. Some of them even sell their knowledge to get your site way up there on all the keywords that are relevant to your site.
In reality Google is changing strategies more often than the average human changes bed sheets. So, knowledge that is useful today will probably be quite useless tomorrow. Every day sites which have been prosperous for quite some time become basket cases overnight, because Google penalizes them in some form or another by having them end up on page 12 instead of page 1 where they used to shine.
The only sites that seem to be immune to this are the sites with great content run by honost people who do not participate in click fraud. Good strategy, the consumer benefits and sleazy site owners should best stay off the web. We have enough of them already.
Recently there are some developments that make me wonder if Google will stay the happy company it used to be. Their advertising department is creating huge conflicts of interest with their core business: supplying indiscriminate information to the consumer. From personal experience I can assure you that they handle that dilemma very well. Using Google ads does not affect your listing in a positive way; I even saw one of my more experimental sites: TheInsaneRobot.com drop dramatically in page rank, only days after adding Google ads to the site content.
The Google ads division is a blessing for those who want to make money with sites that offer a lot of content and at the same time have little possibilities to demand subscription fees of their visitors. (Usually because the competition offers comparable content for free.)
What worries me is something completely different. After Google went to China they came back with an incredible amount of knowledge on how to filter search results to match the demands of the consumer. For China that meant listing Chinese content first. Generally speaking there are not an awful lot of Chinese who read English. I am aware of the fact that there was a large debate on how Google was executing censorship in name of the Chinese government, but I think that is a little exaggerated, aware as I am of the fact that every local Internet provider filters web content in one way or another. If there is one area that Google has no *real* monopoly in — it is filtering web content.
I was reminded of a conversation I had in 1998 with one of the first Dutch fiction publishers who had embraced the Internet and had high hopes for what this new medium could do for the sales of his books. We fantasized about how the WWW would be in ten years. We shared a lot of ideas, and most of them came true, but we had some differences in opinion too. It was my strong belief that the Internet would finally become more of a local than a global affair. That suggestion made him laugh. It was unthinkable in his view.
So far he has been right and I am really happy with that. Two weeks ago however, I was doing my weekly check on page ranking at Google on the keywords that are essential to my business and everything seemed just fine, until I checked this site. Typing “Hans van der Kamp” always resulted in a top link on page one. Suddenly the site had moved to page four.
It took me a while to figure this one out. After comparing other sites and spending quite some time Googling I found out what happened. When changing to the Google bar in my browser that connects to Google.com, instead of Google.nl, my site was top of the page again.
To me it is obvious that Google has used what I would like to call ‘China technology’ to nationalize instead of globalise the web, using the language tags and the domain extensions. Personally I am okay with that; all interest for my photographic works comes from the other side of the ocean, but I feel sorry for all those entrepreneurs who targeted a world audience or market and are in reality – still – mostly depending on their local consumers, goodwill and distribution.
We will see what happens; usually Google engineers are alert enough to alter their course once they see that a strategy is counter productive. Whatever they say about these new monopolists after Microsoft, they are a very flexible company, but will they stay that way with all the law suits and settlements they have been going through the last months over click fraud and other issues?
Months ago I found out that Google is storing high-resolution images (photographs & illustrations) on their own servers. Google spiders have been crawling this site for hi-res images for almost half a year until I removed the downloadable hi-res versions that were originally linked to the low-resolution web images.
I talked to other photographers about this and they all told me that is was for the cache option in Google searching. Well, all the pictures lurked from this site do not appear in the Google cache. A picture search does only deliver the low-res images. So, why do they store those hi-res images?
Google has always been very decent with copyright issues. With every image they deliver as a search result they remind the consumer that the image may be subject to copyright laws. Strangely enough these laws apparently exclude Google. Spidering for images and storing them systematically on your own servers for redistribution is against most international copyright laws. The same goes for video content.
I would assume it is a matter of months before all large image archives will start to drag Google to court. Unfortunately the competition: Yahoo.com and Msn.com, cannot do that, because they would be shooting themselves in the foot since they seem to do the same.
No, I am betting on large institutions as Getty Images to lead the gang that will eventually try to drain Googles funds for shamelessly ignoring international copyright laws. There are times that I really enjoy our thieving free market economy. It is one huge spectacle of frauds and fools. They are always fun to be around with – as long as you do not get too involved.
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