Are Google Losing the Plot?
Love them or hate them Google have been the number one search engine for years, they have become a brand in themselves and a huge household name.
With the current real time phenomenom, which is completley overated in my opinion in terms of search, Google have been getting into a panic because they think that if they do not stay on top of things they are going to lose out on valuable market share. So how have the search giants responded to this?
- Social Search
- Real Time Search
- Google Wave
- Tons of other products and services
We know that Google do a lot of lab testing, but to see things such as real time search be fed into the main index, sometimes even above the organic listings is absolutley mad! These real time results are in no way relevant to what I am looking for and it just looks like a whole lot of spam.
What really is real time? Why are Google in such a panic? If you are looking for a product or a service, real time results are not what you want to see, what you want to see is trusted sites that give you what you are looking for.
So you ask yourself why has real time communication grown so much? Well, it hasnt… What has happened is that more people are now online than ever before and these people just want to talk to each other, most users on sites such as Facebook and Twitter just want to talk to people and view their pictures etc.
Real time communication has been around since the dawn of the internet, does anyone not remember the old MSN Chat?
Now this was genuine real time communication, where you could talk about all of the lastest and greatest happenings on TV/news etc. MSN Chat was hugely popular/successful and well ahead of its time in my opinion. The best thing was that it was moderated by the community, the community got to decide who entered their rooms and room creators were awarded with gold hammers to moderate the room. (This was infact how I first got into SEO, optimising the chat rooms to appear on the first page of the category).
MSN Chat was a real time community like no other.. So why then did it end up shutting down? One of two reasons really:
- Rooms were getting spammed constantly by advertisers
- Because it was extremeley busy, a big reason for MSN chat shutting down was that it provided another opportunity for pedophiles to have access to underage prey through the chat rooms.
So now if we take a look a Twitter as example, have any of these problems been addressed? No!
Twitter are bombarded with spam after spam and because it relies on users there will ALWAYS be spam. I mean even http://twitter.com/twitblacklist shut down, simply because it was getting so bad and this was in July 2008. This is why Facebook can avoid this merely because its you talking to people you know.
Real time communication has still got the same interest it always has had, the only reason more and more people are using these services is because there is now a heck of a lot more people online.
But do we need real time spam (which will always be there) among us when we search? No we do not, all people want Google to deliver is trusted sites, in the end this is what people are looking for when they perform a search on Google. By all means use sites such as Twitter to see posts or pages which are being talked about, but including nonsense, spammy and irrelevant personal conversations in the main index is not a good idea. Past experience and internet history has always shown that when you give users full power things start to slide.. Just look at the redundant MSN Chat and MySpace more recently.
Google go back to your roots and display highly relevant results of pages online, use busy social sites as a ranking factor but do not include conversations in the results.
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Tags: Google, microsoft, msn chat, real time, SERPs, Twitter
The good thing about social media is that content is generated by normal people. The bad thing is that it can also be generated by marketers.
Could agree with you more. Google seem to be mucking up their own search engine. Why don’t they have a supplemental site that updates to the minute.
As an internet marketer how are you supposed to survive. I have three ecommerce sites I have worked very hard on to rank. With a flick of the switch google could wreck that.
@Mike Bensonn:
I think that today the most parts of content are generated by marketeers, so we can’t consider it a “normal content”…
Hmm I sort of disagree, because Twitter sometimes gives great real-time information. It gives a quicker access to certain events such as when WordPress 2.9 RC gave fatal error because the team decided to change a function name, and a few other examples
I think Google was caught on the wrong foot by Twitters success, and are just reacting to it. Like all Kings they are always looking for dangers to their throne’s and are defending it against everyody,Perhaps they should have bought into twitter
but who in their right mind could have ever thought it would have any success
I disagree. Google always number one of internet and communications world. Because they works always developping.
I’ll have to aggree with Zenlab: In All social media the biggest part of content is created by marketers, and it will never change simply because money is a better motivation for creating content than just socializing
@Nana no need to worry, they’ll just buy twitter after it proves itself viable for a few more years
I do to disagree on this…they always try to develop a better solution…
I disagree. Google always number one of internet and communications world. Because they works always developping.
No. Google is dominating everything as usual.
thanks a lot for this great informative article.
Imho i dont think that goole will loose it. they got way too good resources to be just number 2.
Maybe true maybe not… have to wait to see wait they will do.
Theres always a loop hole to everything. Even with googles search engine, you can always find way to rank high on SERP even though your site is irrelevant to the subject.
Great article. I think Google allways will be number one.
They where the first and even googling is a word in many languages.
yes , you are right mike
Very good article, of course I love my twitter account. I have started using Bing for searches due to the spam I get with Google. I remember a time when I could find what I wanted easily and not bombarded with hundreds of thousands of extra stuff.
I agree with a previous poster, Google will buy Twitter out in a few years, that or News Corp will and add it MySpace.
Google’s algorithm is being refined to keep internet marketers from spamming the search engines. It’s usually other social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter that are slow to react and marketers find loopholes to rank high.
These strategies work in the short term and therefore weeds out spammers. Unfortunately, doing things the right way takes a lot of hard work and it’s not fast… therefore you’ll always see people go the easy, fast route and try to get rich quick.
I don’t know, because I think they are trying to stay on top of things as their mission is to organize the world’s information. I guess that includes real-time information as well, but the challenge will be how to sort through and find the most relevant information.
I don’t think Google was ever an Innovator.
Their strategy seems to me to be that of Analyser – they have a stable product (search) – which they didn’t invent; now they can analyse full time and identify key trends (such as web-based office apps) and attempt to refine and improve.
Theres always a loop hole to everything. Even with googles search engine, you can always find way to rank high on SERP even though your site is irrelevant to the subject.
Twitter now becomes a marketing tool most online marketers use.
google > the big boos
thanks
I also thing that Google or News Corp will end up buying Twitter, I wonder how much is it going to be. By now it might be for them better to buy Twitter than come up with a competition to it. Interested to see what will happen.
google is the giant nowadays
Completely agree. Now too much content only for SEO
. It is a war between white-SEO and black-SEO. It seems like search engines should make a force to restrict black-SEO better
Thanks for this great article.
This topic is very intresting! I think that Google will be the main search machine in the world for the long time..!
I think you are absolutely right. People following me in Twitter most of the time turn out to be Spam. If that too happens with Google search, then finding genuine information over internet is going to be tough!
Social media was once considered to be genuine posts by people, but now its being used by marketeers as their promotion tool. We need to wait and watch.
agree with your points but yes wave has a lot of features. but google have been facing some problem in search.
Fantastic blog with rich information regardin SEO.
I started my own blog not long ago and i am constantly on the search for new SEO aspects and techniques.