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http://sotirov.com/2007/02/10/new-tagging-servi...
But this, of course, would be a step towards less power for the Google "search box"... and Google would not do it without serious pressure from outside.
May be, we can shame them into doing it... :)
Or, they may decide that this has the potential of making them an even more powerful web infrastructure player - by complementing their current search hegemony with an ubiquitous distributed "discovery" service.
News publishers don't "own" the links their products engender. They have no control over them at all. In fact, until their product is widely exposed there's not even the possibility of links.
So links are a byproduct of distribution, which today is most efficiently aggregated by Google and therefor own by Google in their algos. A single publisher's ability to generate such links will always pale in comparison to an aggregator's, like Google. IOW, links is an aggregation business not a publishing one.
So who's stealing whose "links"?
It's not a monopoly ... yet.
And I am uncomfortable with the word "stole." Google didn't "steal" anything. They provided something news media weren't providing.
and I don't see providing "easier" access as "control of distribution" either, but that's a minor point.
Actually, now that I took a moment to think about it, Chrome/Android/Gears are obvious defenses of Google's business model against third-party applications. (Perhaps I'm a bit slow on that one.)
I'd still opt for Google-as-middleman over, say, Murdoch/Viacom. Better a dis-interested (dare I call them benevolent?) search Cyclops than the alternative.
Both in Bankruptcy (which lets them break old out-dated contracts) Both the Chicago Sun-Time and Tribune are doing 3000x better for local news stories and ways to organize and distribute the content.
I found these sub-sites through Google News, and now I'm going to take my local feeds off my Google news... the results just aren't as relevant. Now if the papers can just get a handle on local marketing outlets for those sites, and push it on the local angle, they can return more closely in what they offer media buyers to the (similar) days of print advertising everybody in advertising is so worried about losing.
as always, a great post. i think your comment about URL shoteners are key here. plus i think there are categories that do not do as well when fully automated. Finance comes to mind. See what seeking alpha is doing there with a combined automated/edited version. I think local has similar properties as well.
Your point about AdSense is completely valid and may really get to the heart of sites placed in results that are nothing but AdSense links. While running the PPC campaigns for Stericycle and they insisted on running ads on the content network. Therefore I would monitor what sites their ads were shown on regularly. The campaign had over 1,000 sites banned after 9 months. Even after that I still had to regularly ban sites that were just slight misspellings off of sites I had already banned that were obviously the same person setting them up. The thing is somehow AdSense is letting these trash sites charge 5-10x above the average cpc. Sure, 1/10 comes back in a click adjustment credit where they catch the people who click their own sites ads.
Michael-
You're absolutely right about local search returning poor results. I think a lot of this has to do with the system being set up to draw mostly off of data people enter into Google Local. I'm about to start an education push to get more of my small Chicago suburb's businesses listed and see how it affects the results. I think participation may be the key, and Google may need to just employ a ton of people to do a census-like survey of businesses. It would be great for the economy.
70% of that 1/3 comes from Google.
Google is both a competitor and a partner.
Newspapers did this to themselves by not embracing the web properly and fast enough. They were too busy convincing themselves the web wasn't a threat.
Meanwhile, search engines became the destination for news instead of local newspaper websites.
Now it's the job of the newspapers to figure out how to be the destination again. Learn from the mistakes of old thinking. Take back the distribution they once had a monopoly on in their markets and they unknowingly handed off to search engines.
If you only knew the plans that Tribune has in the works in this regard. Whether we/Tribune succeed or not is yet to be determined. But we will most definitely give it one hell of shot. I hope the other newspapers are doing the same.
I am, however, not waving the 'death to Google' flag. I am simply waving the flag of 'survivorship of traditional journalism' flag. Just as I can not imagine a world without Google or other search engines, I can not imagine a world without traditional journalism. Traditional journalism isn't possible without the newspapers cornering enough of the pie to make the numbers work. I'm not saying that every newspaper has to be everything to everyone but they need to continue to do that which others can't. That takes people . . . that takes resources . . . that takes money . . .
NOTE: My opinions are my own and may or may not represent the opinions of my employer. I am not a journalist. I am a search engine marketer.
Google AdSense Privacy Concerns
I think Google, like GM and the banks, has become "too big to fail" - even if all of the honest webmasters and surfers removed AdSense, changed search engines, deleted their Gmail accounts, and stopped using all of Google's analytics, keyword research, and webmaster tools, we would just see them replaced with made-for-adsense crap and black hats looking to make a quick buck (as we are seeing to some extent already).
I hope we can find a reasonable solution to the Google problem, but it is extremely unlikely - especially considering Google's ("alleged") ties to the FBI, CIA, NSA, and others.
That people choose to go to Google to find content, and not to media companies sites is not because Google has exercised some sort of unholy power exercised through the theft of links.
It is because newspapers and other media organisations are signally failing to satisfy the needs of those people.
The idea that the traditional newspaper format: news, comment, crossword, sports, weather etc. is something that could ever survive online is deeply suspicious.
These products were crap in print, and they are crap online - now people have a choice they are exercising it. Newspapers only worked because they had a captive audience. Now they don't and they are failing.
Publishing types can whine as much as they like, but if your business model becomes obsolete that is NOT OUR PROBLEM. Sorry.
Here's the wikipedia page in Japanese, no English:
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%84%A1%E6%96%AD...
We don't "give our links to Google for free". We link because that's how the internet works, that's what makes it useful. Without links, the internet would just be a filing system without navigation.
Google do something interesting with those links, and make their money by selling a service based on that. In return, we get something of value, a search engine that works tolerably well at indexing the billions of pages of content available to us.
It annoys me that media groups who weren't engaging with the net very well back at the start of the century are coming online now and moaning about Google. I guess if you never had to exist in the world where someone would have to spend a couple of hours uploading details of each page launch to a constellation of search engines, few of which would ever deliver any traffic, you might just take having decent search for granted.
Still, if you think you can do better, you're more than welcome - nobody is going to stop you from harvesting those links to build a better search engine, and the world will surely beat a path to your door.
Google isn't perfect, and it's far from evil. But what many of the moaners miss is that it's popular not because it's big; it's big because it's popular. And it's popular because it works.
How about seeing local news as a mobile phone app...
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=250
Directly connects the user with the local news content that they require... and then in-build local advertisers into that app; takes out Google as the AdSense middleman...
c'mon, show some guts
Google doesn't control anything. Control is the wrong word entirely to describe them. They don't steal either. What Google does, and does highly efficiently, is index and expose the open web. They make money the same way, by providing relevant messages alongside indexing.
Your problem is not Google. Your problem is that the open web makes all sites flat, all equally available, and hence permits a wall of content. The entire publishing industry is built in a series of gates and distribution pyramids (which thus funnel advertising) but the web's base structure is completely flat.
It is simply the reality of how the IP-based internet works. The data, links and information are all there for the crawling and indexing. It is no good to place fault with one company or another for being an effective index system. Taking a pot-shot at Google (or Yahoo or probably Twitter in a while -- are you even ready for the real time web?) is like bemoaning power companies for inventing electricity.
This whole article reeks of a sense of lost entitlement. You think you deserve an income rather than finding a way to earn one. You think that somehow your writing is better than some blog or other site, and so you should be paid.
Unfortunately for you, the internet's readership disagrees. There are blogs and publications out there making money on the internet and they do it by really understanding how the web works and working toward it. This may well mean that there is less room for writers and publishers, less entitlement than before.
Tough. That's the way it goes. Innovate and evolve and actually become publishing 2.0 rather than pretending you can grasp whatever strands of the old world remain, rather than finding enemies or demons to falsely blame.
Just to clarify, the use of “steal” and “stole’ is in the sense of “stole the game.” The point of this post is to explain how Google won, and not at all to suggest that they didn’t deserve to win. Google’s success is a direct reflection of how much value they create, i.e. A LOT — they solved a problem in the market that nobody else figure out how to solve or even recognized as the huge opportunity in the market. This post is also intended to help media companies understand better how Google works so that they can better compete in the web content marketplace, not to justify any feelings of “sour grapes.”
The point is that search engines are inevitable because of the internet's structure. Google's search engine is best for now, but there is much to say that it won't always be. Google, for example, is not good at real time search in the way that Twitter or Friendfeed are becoming.
Publishing companies really are wasting their efforts having a go at search engines.
I would more rely on my friend @Glambert's recommendation than Google's because I never would have searched for this.
But b/c I value @Glambert's opinion, I believe his endorsement.
This is the beauty of Twitter and the threat to Google.
Yes of course. Google wasn't even the first company in its class and the internet predates them by many years. They just got a lot right that their competitors didn't and have built on their success. They are not some impossible elder god at heart of the interwaves.
Furthermore, you can't all blame this on google. The internet itself has changed a lot.
The newspaper business has changed a lot, even without google. The barriers to entry have completely disappeared for this market: you don't need journalist or writers, just buy some news, put it on a website, and you can call yourself a newspaper.
And there's a lot more competition now: you can read newspapers from all over the world.
So, easy entry into market, little investment needed, lots of competition: this is not a market where you can earn a lot.
You actually see this in print too. In the Netherlands we have a number of free print newspapers (metro, de pers, etc). These newspapers basically just reprint canned news. And they understand nobody will pay for this, so they completely rely on ads for income.
The newspaper business just isn't a business anymore where customers will pay for the services delivered.
At the moment advertising is the only ball game. So, you could more correctly say that advertising stole the web. Google just happens to be the 10 ton gorilla in the advertising room at the moment.
But that could change in a flash if another universally-appliable, frictionless model for making money on the web appeared.
I'd bet on that happening sooner rather than later. All those content providers are trying everything they can think of.
Google are simply the current anchor tenant of the web.
The issue around the digg bar is more of a self-interest issue for digg, its making its own link building campaign using your content, would be like all your news stories being hosted on google.com and not linked directly to your website.
Everyone says content is king. Yet what we are are seeing is content being commoditized. This and loss of advertising revenue has killed the newspapers.
As content has less and less value, Google continues because its hold on distribution and ranking.
John Deck
It's Microsoft back in the eighties.
A wolf in sheep's clothing.
And publishers should do everything they can to pull the covers back in their own direction.
a) just because the amount of content increases does not mean that the average quality or interestingness of the content remains constant.
b) most people who claim to know search engines by now have grasped that page rank is one of many, many, many signals used for ranking and its importance is steadily decreasing. letting relevance be dominated by page rank creates a scenario that is too easy to exploit.
No need to read the rest since it is likely to be more of the same.
The source of the problem is that newspapers are commodity providers, where they once had a monopoly. If they had unique content, they would generate their own distribution on the 'net, and Google would be their friend. But because they all publish the same stories, the market power shifts to Google.
More depth here: http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/104402-hedged...
Now a days all search engies, directories and Link Buiilding webs are taking Google page rank is one of the primary thing to rank any website.
So what you think if google is stealing contents on the other hand google is sharing every thing with users.
Cheers!