Tad Chef   Jun 04 2012   Flag

I don't agree with this stance. Calling out criticism of Google as "bashing" doesn't make sense. Not everybody can make some impact in Africa etc. but you can change the world right where you are. In order to do so you have to point out power structures and bad decisions behind closed doors. Also the argument that it's free traffic and thus we can't blame Google is just weird. Imagine that in real life: just one company deciding where the streets are leading to and changing the city map over night so there is no traffic to your shop anymore. Well, it's just free traffic, isn't it? So why don't we abolish democracy and let Google decide everything by itself? Shutting your mouth and letting the top down monopolist do everything by itself is just plain naive. Google controls the global information infrastructure while being a for profit corporation that doesn't care about you and me. So the only to do something about is to care yourself and to speak out where possible. Arguing that's it's enough to fight for the few breadcrumbs Google is leaving for us while talking most for itself is also pretty selfish. What happened with Google Shopping is that Google has over the years pushed down most of the other search engines and now capitalizes on being on top itself. It's no accident that Google is under scrutiny by lawmakers all over the world and it's not just "bashing". Imagine one company owning the global transport system and making you pay for it over night. How dystopian.

Doug R. Thomas   Jun 06 2012   Flag

Came here via your post, Mr. Chef. For shopping; I don't understand how Google has shut down Amazon, eBay, or craigslist, to not mention the variety of other niche online retailers. As for organic search in general, it certainly is devastating to your business to lose organic search share. However, if you rely on organic search for a vast majority of your sales, I have little faith in the business on the whole. This is like Foundem and other FairSearch arguments -- they break down in a world of holistic marketing, where real-world deals and brand awareness trump if you show up for your desired keyword. To give a non-commerce example: do people search "funny articles" or do they go to Cracked, Fark, or Smoking Gun directly and poke around? Admittedly, this is a bias on my part. I'd be more concerned about things like screen real estate and self-serving oneboxes if I saw ad clickthrough raise significantly. Or if any other search engine did things any differently - DuckDuckGo? Wolfram Alpha? Bing? All use oneboxes, black box algorithms, and self-serving links. It's got to do with the death of "portal" sites, I feel, and the want for consumers to continue a portal experience. I dunno. I wholeheartedly agree with Guzman's underlying points: Aaron Wall is a brilliant and often convincing writer who is more knowledgeable than many of us ever will be, website owners are too quick to blame arcane penalties when it's really a more mundane underlying issue, and the knockoff FairSearch rhetoric is simultaneously disingenuous and a distraction to effectively running your business. In other words, there is nothing stopping you as a business owner from being just as opportunistic as Google ever is. The worldwide scrutiny of Google is more of the problems that any large data corporation has, especially in Europe where the mentality of what constitutes harm is fundamentally different than America's. Of course, being an apologist for a large multi-national corporation that is embroiled in a variety of antitrust investigations is hardly a particularly tenable or popular position. Of course, Google's a self-interested company. But that doesn't mean that they have to become an NGO of the Web. They don't owe anybody anything, and as soon as they start actively working against their users' interests (or even incidentally but significantly as a result of their opportunism) they're going to go through the same spiral of doom that every company that provides poor customer service does. I also agree with many of your points, especially about the "at least they aren't as bad as Syria" argument. You need both apologists and critics. That's why SEOBook is still one of the sites I check often; that's still why your business's opportunism has to be strong. Thanks for opening a good dialogue :)