We and others have taken note of Google’s recent diet regimen, shedding excess products and initiatives to presumably focus on their core money-spinning search engine business and its ancillaries. There is mounting evidence though of a company resting on its algorithmic laurels, as it were. We’ve often said that Google has become number one by being the best when it comes to search – but with dominance can come complacency.
Sprecken Ze Press Release?
A prime example of this in action is the curious case of German news site Welt Online. Google’s News Search seems to inexplicably view them as the prime source for press releases in English for many companies, despite the fact that the site is almost entirely in German.
Click on the results of the search and you are rarely, if ever directed to the actual release. More often you end up at Welt Online’s current news ticker page – even with weeks-old releases – shades of the United Airlines fiasco last year in which Google’s bots didn’t recognize a news story as being old.
Keep in mind this issue has been occurring for at least a month, with many press releases. How could Google not notice this?
Search Fail
Another, more publicized example of Google’s new attitude occurred early on Saturday January 31st when Google’s search engine mistook much of the Internet for malware. While Google initially blamed partner StopBadware.org and then settled on good ‘ol human error as the culprit, ComputerWorld’s Eric Lundquist rightly points out that there is something badly wrong with a system that allows for that massive an error to be introduced so casually. In essence, we are talking about an errant forward slash, ladies and gentlemen. More important, even 40 minutes of downtime may have cost Google millions of dollars in advertising.
How’s the View from up There?
While it’s abundantly clear that Google is more focused than ever on making money from its main search business, it may have forgotten that their main constituencies are their users, not advertisers. Google’s ability to serve up the best information quickly and simply is what led to its dominant position and advertisers will only flock to them as long as they can serve people up – a function of serving good results to those very same people.
The tin ear they displayed recently with their announcement of the Latitude tracking functionality is symptomatic of a company that is losing touch with the zeitgeist is a surprising way. There is no question that many of the privacy concerns raised about the opt-in system, tied to Google maps, that allows users to broadcast their location via cell phone, are completely overblown. Nonetheless, the climate right now is trending towards more privacy protections with threats of Congressional hearings and a looming battle with the EU over retention of search activity data. Was it smart to make a big deal about Latitude?
We’ve said in our Prediction post that the threat from Google as a search platform comes from other search properties like YouTube (which they own) and potentially Twitter, which serve up specialized results (video, real-time search) that can be more relevant in some cases. We also said that Google can find ways to incorporate this into their search results. Now it seems like the real question is whether Google even notices threats to their empire – especially the one that are of their own making.
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