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How SEO, Google, and Facebook Are Ruining The Web, And Ruining You

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:48:05 +0000

I loved it the other day when Prince said “the internet’s completely over”. Like that statement, and the headline above, much of what I’m about to say will be hyperbole, opinion, and oversimplification. Which is ironic, because that’s kind of what the web has become as a result of some of what I’ll be talking about. Do you remember when there were more than three search engines? When grandma didn’t have a blog, and your mom didn’t ask you “how do I set up a Facebook?” Or when small business owners who can barely use e-mail didn’t ask their web developer questions like “we’ll be be implementing SEO and social media tools when you build my website, right?” I would argue that Google’s domination of search and the ease of installation of WordPress blogs have done nearly irreversible damage to the web. How? Back when there were a half dozen or so competing search engines – Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, MSN, Yahoo, Altavista, etc. -they would have ups and downs and shortcomings, but competition would drive their evolution. And perhaps more importantly, an interesting cycle would drive part of that evolution: a popular search engine would attract SEO experts, which would slowly erode the engine’s organic results, which would cause a migration to a new search engine, which would inspire the top dog to clean up their index, or fail. Then Google came along. They did so many things so well in the beginning that it was almost magical. And slowly their competitors faded into oblivion, so that now, according to stats like this, Google has about 70% of the market, Yahoo 15%, and Bing 9%. So why is that bad? Although a disruptive technology could always come along, for now, there’s little incentive for developers and VC’s to say “hey, let’s start a search engine“. And with Google as basically the only portal to the web for most people, their search results have become so “spammed out” and infested with WordPress-driven linkfarms in general results, and Yelp-like listings in local results, that random searches can often be utterly useless. And Google can care less about that for awhile, because where will you go? It’s sort of like if you were frustrated with your cable TV service. What are you gonna do, call the other cable company? Add to this mix an attempt to cash in on the myth of the wisdom of the crowd, and you get a real mess. Rather quickly, any site that is based on natural networks of user trust will fall apart. Think of something like Yelp. Who bothers to offer up reviews on sites like Yelp? Mostly either opinionated egoists, or angry people. Real experts are too busy doing whatever they do as experts. Which is an idea summed up nicely in this piece by Amber Naslund, which talks about “confusing ego with influence”. And when Facebook becomes the second most visited site on the web, you get an interesting new phase. Google vs Facebook. Google keeps going after Facebook, while Facebook enters the search market. I can’t wait ’til all my search results are based on “Like” buttons that were clicked in e-mail spam campaigns. How about you? Oh I don’t need to ask. Facebook’s Edgerank will keep me informed of what you’re thinking and doing if I need to know. Which is another piece of this e-pocalypse. We already know that Google is making us stupid, but once we’re stupid, is it really such a good idea to make Facebook the very first thing we do each day?

Google Earth’s GeoEye & 360Cities 3D Panoramas

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:02:01 +0000

Here’s a quick preview of 360 Cities
with -appropriately enough – Dead
or Alive as a backing track

Do you ever get that funny feeling that someone is watching you? Well if not, you should. We’re getting closer every day to full time coverage of every location on the planet. Between things like the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in England, the way Google has you covered from your desktop to the sky, and the members of 360Cities obsessively creating cool 360 degree panoramas of the planet (see their blog for the latest views), it won’t be long before there truly will be nowhere to hide. Especially with tools like PhotoSynth to put the info all together. You may or may not find this kind of coverage invasive, but you know what? It’s really kind of FUN too. You may have read that Google made a deal with spy satellite company GeoEye last year to gain a competitive edge over Microsoft, Yahoo and other satellite image search providers. What you may not realize though is that the satellite can capture objects 16 inches across from 423 miles up in space! Don’t worry, Google isn’t allowed to use those images, only the NGA and men of integrity with security clearances like Dick Cheney are. And your secrets are always safe with the US government and politicians named Dick, right? In any case, the upside of all of this is that Google has been showing off the images on their Google Earth GeoEye pages. Even if you’re not stunned with the images, it’s a blast pretending you’re shooting the opening titles for a James Bond film by zooming in and out from the Earth, from an orbital view to street level in seconds. Likewise with the 360 Cities panoromas; some of the images aren’t so thrilling, but moving around in them is an entirely new experience, and a cool one at that. See a sample below.

There should be a 360 degree panorama embedded below.
Let us know if it doesn’t work on your system….

What’s So Great About Google Music Search?

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 15:18:34 +0000

Don’t look for Amazon or iTunes links in
your results with Google’s new music search

Nothing. Well, there are good things about it, but nothing great. Frankly, Google’s really starting to get on my nerves. They have a little bit too much of that Lord of the Rings “One Ring to rule them all” thing going on. Yes, it’s kind of cool that if you search for a band or a song, you now suddenly have the ability to play it right there in your search results. The other touted features – like the ability to search lyrics and get the same results for instance – are so inconsistent that I’m surprised the best and brightest at Google decided to include them. And the omission of iTunes and Amazon from those clickable previews is a mixed bag; yes it’s great to see less monolithic companies being promoted, but the fact is that this is probably just Google’s way of launching their own monopoly. It will be interesting to see how that plays out; so far their key partners include Lala, Rhapsody, Pandora, Imeem, and MySpace. I personally buy all my digital music at either Amazon* (which accounts for 10% of U.S. digital music sales) or iTunes (which accounts for 69% of U.S. digital music sales), and have no problem with that. If Google’s foray into the market generates competition and lower prices, or gives indy artists more exposure, excellent. If not, it’s just more search engine clutter, and another annoyingly distracting sales channel that benefits no-one. But don’t listen to me, try it yourself. Here’s a search box…

Social Search: Who Gives A Twinglebook?

admin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:52:01 +0000

I was wondering why no-one seemed to give a twinglebook about the fact that Microsoft struck search deals with Twitter and Facebook, and that Google not only has their own deal with Twitter, but plans to launch their own “Social Search” in the near future. Then I remembered that the average person doesn’t know their Firefox from a hole in the ground (YouTube link, video is also below). Well, I have to admit that I care; depending on how both Microsoft and Google choose to integrate real-time search results from social networking sites, this could either be really interesting, or really annoying and/or paranoia-inducing. More so the annoying part; ever since SEO became a parasitic, opportunistic business instead of an integrated part of web site development, search results have become less and less useful on a steady downward curve. The beauty of Twitter Search is its real-time results; the ugly downside is that all those results are spam-infested Tweets! Who cares how fast you can search multi-level marketer’s tweets (see Will the Twitter Firehose Become a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose) ? In my opinion, the only real value of these relationships the two search giants are building with Twitter would be real-time search of everything but Twitter noise. Hopefully they’ll pursue that, but Bing’s beta version of Twitter search appears to be just, well, Twitter search. How mixing this stuff in with regular results is going to benefit anyone is beyond me. These moves also come at an odd time, when both Facebook and Twitter’s growth are flattening out. And the paranoia mentioned earlier? Google’s Social Search will require you to be logged in with a Google Profile, and will connect additional search results via your existing “friends” on various social networking services, thereby tracking all your searches and connecting them with people you know. But perhaps I fret about this sort of thing too much. After all, Googoo has a excewent pwivacy powicy.

Google asks New Yorkers to tell us the difference between a search engine and a browser:

Your Facebook & Twitter Activity Is Tracked More Closely Than You Think

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:53:06 +0000

Next time you’re Twittering your thoughts, making a status post, or taking a quiz on Facebook, remember that not only are you creating part of an eternal online identity and probably sharing your information with more people than you thought (especially see question 3 in that ACLU quiz), you’re also helping shape marketing and political decisions. We’ve written jokingly about Googlewanking and Googlewashing before, but the two latest big things on the web – Social Media Monitoring and Sentiment Analysis – are making the web a different place. On the abstractly interesting side of this, sentiment analysis sort of renders the typical CNN or Time user poll (typically called a Voodoo Poll) even more absurd than they were. Online polls have always had major shortcomings, but the main one was that of limited demographic diversity, i.e.: only dorks who take CNN polls take CNN polls. A recent classic example of their susceptibility to gaming and inaccuracy was when “moot”, the 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, became the “World’s Most Influential Person” in a Time user poll. The difference with these newly evolving data mining tools is that they remove the obvious errors caused by selection bias or gaming by monitoring the unsolicited expressions of millions of users’ thoughts and feelings directly. On a personal level, another big difference is that whereas even a couple of years ago it took considerable effort to “dig through the noise” to find specific pieces of information, it is now routinely done on a large scale by companies competing aggressively in this arena (here’s a list of 10 of them, and here’s a much longer list) often to define or defend a brand. How this plays out for searching for information about individuals can be quickly demonstrated by services like 123people.com. Enter a name, and they quickly scour photos, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, weblinks, social network profiles, biographies, Instant Messenger, microblogs, blogs, news, and general documents to display info about a person conveniently on one page. This sort of thing is so easy to do that MIT student Aaron Zinman, for instance, built an art installation around the idea (thanks for the link, Hava). I’m not so concerned about this on a superfical level; thanks to all the other Ian Grays being such busybodies on the web, I’m semi-invisible in many of these searches, and I kind of like it that way. But what kind of online identity do you have?

Google Maps: Turn Left At The Light And Kayak 3,879 Miles

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:10:26 +0000

Google has some serious quirks. We’ve written about the bizarre results of Google’s autocomplete function, and we were surprised to find that there really is a WTF, California. But when we decided to drive from Detroit, Michigan to Sydney, Australia, we were rather surprised to find some serious flaws in Google’s driving direction data. It wasn’t so much that Google was telling us to drive across the northern United States (see image at left), which – when factoring for the curvature of the Earth – probably added at least a thousand miles to the drive. And it wasn’t even when they said we’d have to kayak through the Strait of Juan de Fuca into the Pacific Ocean. What really took the cake was when Google suggested we had to kayak first 2,756 miles to Hawaii:

And then kayak another 3,879 miles to Japan:

Adding insult to injury by displaying the next 60 steps in Japanese, and…

Then we had to kayak yet another 3,358 miles to the Northern Territories…

…to finally get more driving directions to end in Sydney:

We expected to get in a kayak at least ONCE on
this trip, but THREE TIMES? Get it together, Google!

By the way, if you think we faked any of this, see for yourself:

View Larger Map

Google Autocomplete: Sex, Infidelity, Body Parts

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:42:18 +0000

Google’s autocomplete function can provide some interesting insights into human thought and interpersonal relations. Below are just a few examples. Have any odd ones of your own to share? I had no idea that the most pressing “Why Do” question in the world was “Why do men have nipples”. And likewise, I’m surprised that neither gender seems to know if the other likes pubic hair. I’m even more surprised that this the number one suggestion for both. I’ve also always thought kissing was a nice simple thing. But no, it’s rife with suspicions of adultery and safety concerns. And c’mon guys. Why so much harsher than the women?

Don’t Be A Googlewanker

admin — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 06:59:19 +0000

Although Google recently released their 2008 Year-End Google Zeitgeist, I’d like to point out a significant oversight in their methodology: If they were to treat every individual searcher’s name as a single search term, I’m pretty sure the number one search would be a form of Googlewanking. And for the record, if you’re prone to this behavior and find you’ve left an embarrassing trail on line, you might want to try a Googlewashing service. In any case, I think it says something about America that the top searches haven’t changed much since the . People still pretty much search for celebrities, games, and cataclysmic events. Personally, since I have to do a lot of research for clients, I think I’ve actually viewed all the pages in Google (as I joked with a friend the other day: “The Internet? I’ve seen it.”), so I’m always looking for new tools. One of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while is Idée Labs’ tools like Multicolr Search. Click colors and it finds photos that contain them. Or TinEye. Give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the web. And for you Googlewankers who haven’t seen the entire Internet yet, maybe you should talk to Ms Dewey, if you haven’t met her before. And since she takes so long to get loaded, here’s your Monday time-waster: MindCards. Annoyingly simple, yet annoyingly hard to score well on.