Google – Straws in the Wind
Google still seems to be the darling of Wallstreet but I wonder…
If I was invested in Google stock my recent experiences with Google would be rather sobering.
Google Adwords
I have been having a lot of problems with Google Adwords. The basic idea is that you bid on a list of keyword phrases… If a Google end user searchs for one of the phrases you have bid on… He gets the regular Google search results on the left hand side of his browser page and your sponsored link will appear on the right hand side. How prominently your ad will be placed depends on whether your bid (say $0.25 per click) for the search phrase is higher or lower than your competition.
We are marketing Boston Christmas cards… So one of my Google Ad phrases is “Boston Christmas Cards” but it does not show up… Originally I had set an option in Google Adwords that said that I wanted my sponsored link to be “regional” i.e. it should only show up if the person searching was connected to the internet in the Boston region. And since I live and work in the Boston area, my sponsored link should show up when I Google for “Boston Christmas Cards”. But it doesn’t. The reason being that Google Adwords thinks I am browsing from Alabama. The Google Adwords diagnostic tool identifies my location (based on my Verizon.net ISP connection IP address) as follows:
Domain: www.google.com
Language: English (US)
User Location: Alabama, United States
But if I go to a publicly available tool at dnsstuff.com it easily finds my correct location:
Your IP is 141.154.254.246.
Welcome visitor from [City: Boston, Massachusetts] United States.
This is just one example of the sort of technical glitsches I am encountering with Google Adwords. Even when presented with this sort of “smoking gun” evidence of a problem, the Google CS folks just say everything is working fine.
Google Print
I have a customer who has published a book. He wanted to have the book made available on Google Print. We submitted all the necessary PDF files well over a month ago and the book still is not available on line. When we check the book’s status we find that it is listed twice as “pending”. This was called to Google Prints support folks attention a number of weeks ago but the book is still double listed and is still listed as “pending.”
Google “Sandbox” phenomenon
Finally, the heart and soul of Google, their basic search capability seems to be slipping. If you do a search on “Google Sandbox” (heck try it in Google) you will find numerous references to a phenomenon whereby new sites are ranked much lower than sites that were created and indexed earlier. The general consensus amoung the people specializing in Search Engine optimization is that the date threshold for being ranked lower is currently sometime in early 2004.
Now Google is perfectly entitled to use any search criteria they want but, if it ends up producing search results that are of less utility to the end user, they do so at their peril.
As you will find in the various articles on the “Google Sandbox Effect”, one way of identifying if a site is being “sandboxed” is to search using a relevent search string in Google, MSN, and Yahoo. If the target site is well ranked in MSN and Yahoo but doesn’t show up in Google then there is a possibility it is being “sandboxed”. The actual criteria are more complicated than that. My point is that, in many cases, the “un-sandboxed” results of MSN and Yahoo are much more useful to the end user than Google’s results are.
Conclusion
It is certainly too early to tell if Google is going to be displaced as the king of the search world but I see some disturbing trends. They seem to be diversifying faster than their technology can be implemented reliably, their CS can be best described as complacent, and they are being targeted by competitors with considerable resources and capabilities. At this point Google is synonymous with searching it may end up being metaphor along the lines of the Titanic.
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