This'll be a two part post, so bear with me.
First, Captain's Quarters comments on the drop that his large blog has seen in search results on Google. My impression of Google is that it is not nearly as blog friendly as Yahoo is. I speak from a limited point of view, namely my own site stats, but Yahoo searches find Jiblog much, much more often than Google-unless the search is a dirty search. Then Google finds Jiblog, even though the words in the search term aren't found together on this site. I find this trend a little strange given that Google owns Blogger. Logic would say that Yahoo shouldn't be as blog friendly, and Google should be very blog friendly.
Second, there has been some talk around the blogosphere about Google's corporate politics showing through. This has generally revolved around who Google does and does not allow as a source in Google News, but it also shows itself in the fact that Google has chosen not to recognize Easter today with one of their stylized logos at the top of their search page, but they did choose to recognize World Water Day earlier this week. Google has every right to recognize whatever special day they choose, but I have one word of advice for them. As a business, they have a mass market. When you have a mass market, don't wear your corporate politics on your sleave. Only companies with niche markets can get away with that without losing customers. I'm sure Google feels invincible right now, but I've already started to turn away from Google a bit and back to Yahoo. It is possible that many others are as well.
Update
Well there have been a couple of interesting developments on point one. First, Captain's Quarters had been yanked from Google's listings because a sponsor of his site was link farming (See here for more if you host ads). As for Jiblog, there have been a flurry of Google search hits since I originally posted this. Which leads me to only one possible conclusion-Google's machines are self aware and out to make me look like a fool. :-).
1 comment:
Two very good points. I also see a lot of yahoo searches leading to my blog. But since my blog is not 'high traffic' apparently, google does not index it as often as I would like it to. Given that they own blogger, I would have thought, like you said, that they would index blogger blogs all the time. Not so. Certainly.
And on your second point, since I don't care much about Easter, I would not feel much pain if they did not change their logo as such on Easter. What I don't like, if it is true, is the fact that they choose their sources in the News pages. I love the http://news.google.com site and I use that page as my home page, to scan the headlines as and when I want to. But if they are not pulling from some sources because they don't feel like it, it is sad. Google is an amazing company - with so much talent and so many ideas in it. And more importantly, so many of those bright ideas are getting materialized into real world products for us consumers to use. But if this is going to continue like this, and Yahoo making a solid reason to switch to them (everything you want, you can get on yahoo - sports, entertainment, news, business, finance, mail, storage, photos, etc.), I am considering is it worth dumping google.
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