Does Google Still Do It For You?

There is always an endless archive of articles on the Internet that explain the excitement and joys of Google as well as the sheer hatred and anger that people have against the company and their ever popular search engine. There is a world of people who don’t just hate Google because their sites got slapped or penalized for selling paid links. There too is a world of people who rave about not only how awesome their search engine is but how cool their many other free services are. Whatever the opinion may be, you can always count of hearing people dish it out on their blogs.

People expect some wild and crazy things from Google. Many people refer to Google, especially the Googlebot as an actual person. Would it be far fetched to expect Google and their fleet of web crawlers to be more humanlike? Mike Troiano, recently wrote an article that vividly shares his personal experience with Google over the last ten years. “I still remember the first time I used Google. It was in early 1998, and I was sitting in my office at Ogilvy & Mather in New York. I hit the page, expecting something Yahoo!-ish, and sat there staring at a word and a box on a white page for maybe five seconds, marveling at the boldness of it.”, says Mike Troiano.

Many people too can agree that Google’s bare bones home page seems to perplex many once they see what kind of results can be delivered form within. But, the Google search engine is far from having the characteristics of a human, and that was the something that Mike Troiano almost longed for after the 10 years of being a user. Troiano explains, “Why doth Google suck? Let me count the ways.Google.com doesn’t know or care about me. Google.com doesn’t care or know about where I am. Google.com is ignorant of meaning.” In fact, Troiano is so passionate about his feelings on Google he recently wrote an entire article about it titled, “Google Sucks: Why It Might Be a Good Thing“.

Some people even go so far as to feel like Google is personally out to get them, as if they are being singled out and targeted. This strongly seems to be with the case with John Pozadzides when he recently discovered that his web site no longer pulled up in the ranks for certain keywords that used to. “Someone over at Google has seriously got it out for me! Why is it that just 30 days ago I reported that I was number 2 for a search for “John P.” and number 12 for the word “John”, but just today I was amusing a friend and noticed that if you search for John I’ve now dropped to number 206!”, said Pozadzides. The lose of ranking for these keywords lead to the publication of a blog post titled, “Google Sucks Again!!!.”

I think an important thing to realize is that the Google search results constantly change. If they didn’t then you would have no chance at ranking in them. For every search term that you are able to rank for, consider the fact that there is also a former result that you have just knocked down to a lower rung on the ladder. That reason alone is why I don’t participate in sponsored posts and paid text links. How would you like to get your free organic ranking that you worked long and hard for only to be bumped down by someone who paid his way to over take your position?

What about all the Google Freebies? Don’t they count for something? Personally for me, I am surprised that Google doesn’t promote more of their services more than they already do. I consider myself to a a somewhat tech savvy guy, yet too it was just recently within the last year that I discovered some of their freebie services. Travis Wright discovered Goog 411 and recently wrote a blog post about yet another reason why he felt like Google Rocks. And then you have to case with Ronnie Marler who discovered how cool he thought that Google Sites was. All in all, I think Google leaves a bitter and a sweet taste in the mouths of millions of people.

So What Do You Think?

Is Google still doing it for you? Do you enjoy using Google and their array of free services, or do you have a bone to pick with them about something? Where do you see Google in the near future? What kind of changes do you think are in store for publishers as well as bloggers? Share your thoughts about Google in the comments. There is no doubt that you’ll have something to get off your chest.

Written by Garry Conn

July 21st, 2008 at 12:03 am

Posted in Money Tips

Tagged with Google Doesn't Suck, Google Is Cool, Google PageRank, Google PageRank Updates, Google Rocks, Google Search Results

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12 Responses to 'Does Google Still Do It For You?'

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I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who hated Google who hadn’t felt like they’d been singled out for something. Personally I don’t buy it, if everybody who “thinks” they’ve had a manual penalty actually had then Google must do nothing but spend all their time researching and applying slaps.

Me, I like Google, from their relevant search engine to their free unlimited storage IMAP enabled e-mail system. As for Analytics, that alone saves me hundreds of dollars a month.

Paul B

21 Jul 08 at 7:09 am
To quote Troiano:
“Why doth Google suck? Let me count the ways.Google.com doesn’t know or care about me. Google.com doesn’t care or know about where I am. Google.com is ignorant of meaning.”

This sounds like an incredibly emotional post. Hi is right that Google doesn’t know or care about him. Google cares about content. I beg to differ on the part about Google knowing or caring where he is. Google does in fact know where is he (and his servers) are geographically. I wouldn’t say they cared about him, but if he has used Google in the past I’m sure they care about the data they received from him for the time he was there.

The sentence about Google.com being ignorant of meaning just cracks me up. What is the meaning of that statement?

Owen

21 Jul 08 at 8:05 am
Anytime a company becomes as dominant as Google, they are sure to suffer a backlash. In addition, since they are so big, they are unable to provide individual users reasons why their site may have lost its Google mojo.

I bet you had to use Yahoo or another search engine to find most of the posts you cite

Kevin

21 Jul 08 at 9:56 am
I really do think it’s funny when people do think that Google is pinpointed their site out of billions. A lot of these sites where the author or publisher feels that they got shafted, you can do some very basic research on their previously published web pages or blog posts to see that they have violates Google’s TOS.

So I could be wrong here, but this is what I think. I think that the when the crawler scans the web page for indexing, there are certain things that can trigger “yellow” and even “red” flags. Get too many of those, then I think you’ll be scheduled for a manual visit by a human working at Google. If that person doesn’t like what he sees, then it’s doom for the publisher in violation.

Garry Conn

21 Jul 08 at 12:02 pm
Hi Owen,

Troiano further explains his meaning in the following paragraphs found on his article:

Google is powered by machines that troll the net for character strings, not words per se, in the way we use them. It is used most often by people interested in information, concepts, or even ideas, as opposed to the unique collection and sequence of letters that form “STUPID.” See a problem?

Now, what made Google so great in the beginning was its clever way around this problem, essentially to conduct a non-stop popularity contest where it learns what people want based on the string of letters they enter. If most of the people who search “STUPID” tend to click on a page, uh, “lacking intellectual rigor,” then so be it. That link rises to the top of the query when others input the same word. A system like that only gets better the more people use it, which is what makes Google appear so unassailable.

I agree with you totally. Google does know the location from where you access the site. I am not sure why he said that Google doesn’t know where you are at. Perhaps he didn’t mean that in a geographical standpoint. Troiano seems to be a very skilled writer and obviously a very deep thinker. I can’t say that I agree with the article he wrote, but indeed, I really do like his deep thinking and writing style.

Garry Conn

21 Jul 08 at 12:06 pm
Ha ha… indeed one would think so Kevin. But sure as rain, I used Google Blog Search to find my material for this post.

Google Sucks
Google is Great
Google Rocks
Google Bites
Google SERPS
Lost SERP Rank
…etc.

You should check out all the juicy things people say about Google on their blog.

Garry Conn

21 Jul 08 at 12:13 pm
Google is the freakin man! Ahahaha. I love google, I think they are innovative, some things suck…sure….how do they calculate some of their rankings? I don’t know…why do they slap people? Maybe because sometimes we deserve to be slapped!

I don’t have an extensive relationship with google yet, but I love their free services. They are on the edge and I like it.

You can’t live without them, so you may as well join them and see how they can help you!

Check out JK Swopes’s last blog post..IMwithJoe weekly report and goals for the week 7-21-08

JK Swopes

21 Jul 08 at 3:49 pm
Lately I have been starting to use Yahoo! as an alternative to Google.

Mike Dammann

23 Jul 08 at 8:51 pm
Of course, you took John P’s comment completely out of context. He was making a joke out of it…

Oh, this is such a huge blow to my ego. I’m just not sure I can keep going on. I’m no longer more important than John Dvorak, Sir Elton John, John Travolta, and the Johns Hopkins University. How do they justify this egregious act!/blockquote>

But whatever… I guess the sensational title and the small section of quote before he got to the funny part was all you needed.

Not You

25 Jul 08 at 10:48 pm
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Sunday Musings - July 27, 2008 | Moneybites.com

27 Jul 08 at 1:15 pm
Overall I am a friend of Google… they give me a good service and allow me to find things reasonably quickly and efficiently.

I love Gmail and occasionally use other free service.

I am a little perplexed when certain things don’t go my way though….. like my new site getting PR0 when much less visted / ranked / less linked sites of mine grabbed PR2’s!!!

But….. I can’t blame Google. They have a calculation and that is the way it is.

Check out Forest’s last blog post..Shaners quick guide to living cheap – 20 frugal tips

Forest

28 Jul 08 at 10:39 am
I appreciate what Google does for me, in terms of visitors, GMail and Adsense revenue – the only thing that does concern me is the reliance that my online business has on them – if the traffic from Google drops, it has a big effect.

Check out Zath’s last blog post..BBC iPlayer (UK)

Zath

5 Aug 08 at 4:55 pm