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Search Engines Leech Value from Web Sites
bigenchilada writes "Jakob Nielsen, former Sun Distinguished Engineer and now usability guru, proposes "that search engines are sucking out too much of the Web's value, acting as leeches on companies that create the very source materials the search engines index."
He says that the value provided by search engines may be tilting too much in favor of the search engines. The web sites that create content are now simply fodder for the search engines' revenue stream."
This "tilt" intrigues. It's interesting in that it describes an unfolding and evolving business model to which companies must react.
I like that he doesn't just whine about the problem but offers solutions too, to provide the "stickiness" required to keep customers coming and interacting with companies' sites. This is the way the evollution should work.
Oh, that the RIAA and the music industry would have to abide by the same principle now that their business model has changed, rather than buying legislation to cripple advances in technology (which, btw, will NOT work).
Maybe, maybe, the music industry could learn something from this.
This is likely why Google and Yahoo are offering monetization options for content publishers (and creators). Plus, if you don't like search engines "leeching" from you, just set up robots.txt and say no to everything -- they'll go away.
I find that search engines account for nearly 70% of my visitors overall, and account for nearly 60% of my return visitors. I don't believe I can rely on my websites to generate income for me (even if I start selling more products on some sites). As I don't copyright any of my text (I am anti-copyright and put all my creations into the public domain immediately), I use my writings to try to increase my income in my regular life -- speaking engagements, one-on-one consulting, and professional advice to companies and individuals in the markets that I'm valuable in.
Nielsen is nuts if he thinks that the web should scoff at search engines. Search engines are (to me) the biggest reason for the web's overall explosion. Bookmarks help, links from other sites are great, but Google, MSN and Yahoo are the big reasons people can find what we want when we want. If they can't index our sites, how can they send us traffic? Sure, he acknowledges this in his article, but he says that web sites are going from information stores to answer engines. This is completely true, and we all fall victim to our own stupidity when it comes to creating content in an "answer" fashion. I've been working over the past few months to try to create extended interest in my most popular pages (found via search engines) by offering crosslinks to other articles. The longer I can keep the people interested, the more likely I am to see them come back again and again. If you make old "answer" pages, offer links out of those pages that give people MORE information, or give them more questions to find answers to.
Content is worthless without distribution. I prefer face-to-face distribution for profit by using more generic information to "catch" the customer who will hire me. Yet without the search engines, how will I get the word out? Hire a publicist?
Slightly off-topic here:
I think its crazy to put quality profitable information on a website (or even in a book, on a CD or in a movie) that you don't want used by others. Copyright may "protect" you from someone knocking it off in high quantity, but that isn't always where information is the most valuable. Using information in an expert situation is how you can turn quality profitable information into that quality profit -- by selling your advice on a person-to-person level (I call it a performance).
... then learn to use robots.txt. Simple really.
__Laugh daily funny adult videos
Wow, this guy thinks things on the web have value. Its all just pictures of ugly babies and nerds talking about wires and crap.
I'm sorry. Search engines are to the web site's benefit as well... at least to commercial sites.... well research sites too. Let's face the reality. There cannot be a way to "balance" the benefit. You either do or don't benefit -- it's an on or off situation. If you don't benefit, there's "robots.txt" right? Whiners!
The question, then, is how much will the growth of Wikipedia negativly effect Google? I know I've started doing Wikipedia searches for things I would have Googled for before.
Anyone that has a website and serves it up using the HTTP protocol went in with the understanding that the information would be accessible and indexable by the world. If they don't like it, they can turn on robots.txt and enjoy a nice warm cup of STFU.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I read this article when it went high on the del.icio.us/popular list. Long story short: this guy is complaining about *advertising* links in a search engine. Then he goes and compares a bunch of apples to oranges and concludes the sky is falling (yes, I meant to mix metaphors, as this is what this guy does in his complaint).
If you look at his analysis, he is coming from this from a perspective that most of the Internet can't really related to: a business to business commerce site that uses no advertising revenue and pays a high "click-through" cost for each visitor from a search engine.
After all of those constraints are in place, he further comes up with the idea that by making $4 per visitor (after COGS and conversion rates) "the site can pay $3.99 per click". Well, I guess if you really are hellbent on giving your profits away you could...
He tries to justify this by saying that "if you don't pay this, other sites can outbid you". He justifies this by saying that others will use his sites methods to improve conversion rates and therefore they will outbid you with the increased revenue. Well, maybe, or maybe they will keep some of the profit.
This commentary is not applicable to those with advertising supported models, nor those who are willing to differentiate themselves by more than hyper-competition in search engine optimization. Which means pretty much most web sites are *not* going to see the results that are predicted here. The ones that *will* see this are those that don't have a differentiator and live and die by the converted sale. I think I will cry now... [sniff]... poor toner refill sites.
His solution: #1, spam the user. #2, notification spam. #4, multi level marketing.
Sig under construction since 1998.
The web sites that create content are now simply fodder for the search engines' revenue stream.
No they're not. In the future, please perform your mental masturbation in the privacy of your own home. Now go away.
Advice: on VPS providers
Tell it to the florist i know who registered 18 different domain names and put up six different websites for his 1 business and stuffed them silly with keywords.
It's total and utter bullflop, and it works. And we hate him for it . . .
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
For me, because of how fast google loads on my mobile device, I *prefer* to use it instead of going to a site directly. While this furthers his reason for writing the article it doesn't explain why websites have failed to cater more towards mobile devices. Yeah, writing for WAP is a pain in the ass as well as making sure that the sites load correctly for numerous browsers but that's what the sites SHOULD be doing anyway.
Instead of suggesting that we move to direct e-mail marketing and using some sort of post-update ping to alert customers of site changes, we should be moving to fast loading pages and RSS feeds.
While this guy makes interesting points about how websites are "suffering", I think his suggestions on how to change that are poor. Promoting what is little more than spam isn't the way to attract customers back to your site.
The problem is that copying stuff from my website is too easy. We need stronger copyright laws.
No, wait -- we need *weaker* copyright laws because then I can use anything I find on my site.
Er, no, wait -- we need *stronger* copyright laws because big-money search engines are destroying the value of the little guys.
No, no, no, wait -- we need *weaker* copyright laws because then I can download movies legally.
Ah. I've got it. We need *weak* or *zero* copyright laws for me, and *strong* copyright laws for everybody besides me.
Sure, I can search for certain things simple things and get the result via google. Google even has tools built in for conversions like... "5280 feet in miles" will tell you that it is 1 mile. If I'm actually RESEARCHING something, or looking for detailed information then I have to go to the result sites.
What exactly was the problem again?
If your search bid stays the same, your ad will sink off the page as more and more competing sites improve their design enough to afford higher bids. Our site therefore has no choice but to increase its own bid to $7.99 per click if it wants to stay in business.
I agree to some extent that the search rankings are somewhat unfair, but a good website will probably have the power of word-of-mouth advertising.
If the site is indeed very useful and well-liked, it should have no problem sticking around.
I guess the real problem for websites is getting noticed in the first place, and keeping that core audience in the long run.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...Free. I don't pay them to index my sites, and they send me potential customers. Somewhere around 80% of my traffic is related to search engines. Sure, they're getting money from advertising other sites that may compete with you, and they don't produce content of their own. But at least I don't have to pay 400 dollars for a page in the yellow book and reach a whole city of customers when I can have my site indexed and reach a whole world. (unless they don't speak english, then they can't get much value from my site)
The author's point is, in a nutshell, that web business are reducible to the cost of their traffic and the revenue it can generate.
His example is something like this: 100 users with a 1% conversion rate for a $4 net profit means you pay $3.99 to the Search Engine for traffic to make 1 cent. Since the search engines are effectively a traffic auction, you always pay exactly as much as your competitors are willing to pay plus a small amount...
I find fault with this argument, because search engines are not a traffic auction, exactly. Google sells adwords but it primarily gives users what they ask for, not what others pay for. Still this is the reality and the mindset of many online businesses, if there are 10,000 other companies like yours, you can only be seen by buying traffic.
His concern is that the search engines' position is too strong - they're the bottleneck, and they price like it. They've created a market where they take most of the profits from any online enterprise. If web businesses find a way to increase margins then it instantly translates into increased search engine fees rather than increased profits, and google earns it by sitting back and "doing nothing."
Of course, they do something, but just like Sony and Tower records, their indispensability may have been converted into a disproportionate amount of the profits of global enterprise.
From 20,000 feet, thinking in a way we seldom do anymore, we could consider alternate regulatory regimes that might tinker with the market. For instance, if you accept that this state of affairs may not be optimal (a few megagiants and millions of small businesses beholden to them), you could flatten it by reinterpreting things like copyright, so that the search engine is not entitled to list anything without splitting a cut of the profits of that enterprise with the content creators.
I'm not actually suggesting this, just trying to seed discussion. One thing that this vaguely reminds me of is the Neal Stephenson concept of the free-market encyclopedia, where anyone can write anything and upload it into the system, and then you get paid, more or less directly, for traffic... presumably by redistribution of fees paid into the system to view content. It's appealing in the way it incentivizes creation of content, especially in such an egalitarian way.
We've got an all-you-can eat model where you pay for access and others pay to publish and writers can pay the rent with advertising or subscriptions... and of course, we have a free market for search services... I like it well enough, but I do sympathize with content creators, who still seem to struggle to realize the value of their intellectual works.
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On the other hand, include a couple of keywords or search terms that people are interested in, and I start getting search engine hits. People start finding my site. If I have a commercial site, or one with HOWTO docs on Linux, or interesting political commentary, then the search engines are the ONLY way people are going to find my site. People might even add links to my content on their pages, if they find it interesting enough, but the only way to break in is through the search engines.
(Now, there are all the techniques that some sites use to artificially boost their ranking on search sites and abuse the system, but that's a different issue.)
Your Servant, B. Baggins
The search engine benefits from the ad revenue; the sites benefit from the increase in visitors. Both sides win.
Why not create your own index of content, with headlines, and/or little blurbs, so the search engines find that and only that throught the use of your robots.txt file?
It's the *AA or the ??AA, **AA is redundant.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
How's this bad? Modern search engines now spit back sound-bite sized chunks of data - a chunk of data that is JUST long enough for the modern american attention span. There's no downloading PDFs (hate that) or trying to parse some asswad's idea of "interface design" (hate that more), or flash, or flash ads (hate that almost as much). I plug in a query and I get back a short list of bullet points I can skim through in seconds, thence on to the site that looks like it's got what I'm looking for - saving me the time of trolling multiple other sources for information they don't have.
Some monkey's pissed because he's not getting revenue from me for running a site I shouldn't need to look at in the first place? Deal.
I wonder if that's why Google's market cap is a gazillion dollars. Maybe searching the world ultimately means owning it. Web sites are only the beginning. Now print media is being cannibalized by book searches, often despite the explicit protestations of the authors and publishers. Video and audio scraping are on the way. Of course, the argument in favor is that you only get a little "context" in your search result. Ultimately, however, if you paste enough context together you have the entire work.
"He says that the value provided by search engines may be tilting too much in favor of the search engines. The web sites that create content are now simply fodder for the search engines' revenue stream."
Yes, and this is exactly why everyone I know in the e-commerce business spends an exorbitant amount of time trying to figure out how to prevent their site from becoming "fodder" for Google's revenue stream. Because, of course, Google brings absolutely no value what-so-ever and and does nothing to drive traffic.
Riiiiiight....
No wonder Sun has so many problems. They used to be the "dot in dot com"
until IBM took over that in 2000 or so*.
The value of the web is priceless (and free!), how could a search engine
to find stuff on it decrease that value?
This is the one of the most silly things I have read since Taco said the
iPod was lame.
TFA says, "We've known since AltaVista's launch in 1995 that search is
one of the Web's most important services."
Then, "There's no doubt that search engines provide a valuable
service to users. The issue here is what search engines do to
the companies they feed on -- the companies that fund the creation
of original information. Search engines mainly build their business on
other websites' content. The traditional analysis has been that search
engines amply return the favor by directing traffic to these sites."
I use Google for everything. I never type in a blind url, because I make
mistakes from time to time and get some typosquatter or other troll.
What I do is go to the Google box next to the url box and type something
like "barns an noble". Notice I mispelled the name, but even with my
error, the first linke was "Barnes & Noble", which is what I was
looking for. (DNS is already dead because of this, Google is the dot in
dot eveything).
I would have no idea that the url would have been barnesandnoble.com.
Many users don't know that a & is not a valid url character, and
they would mistakently put it in the url if they were to blindly type
it. Most web browsers would give a worthless error message like "The
specified server could not be found." Thanks. I used to run a web proxy,
I've seen everything in the world typed into the URL spot.
What Google and other search engines have done is flood the market with
worthless, fly by night companies. Stable ones have no issues. Search
for Apple computers, or Oracle database, you get useful links. Search
for a commodity item you can get anywhere for the same price, and you
get every sleezeball in the world trying to get your $25, when you could
also just have walked to the store and got it for $30, and played with
it that day.
Niche items are different. I can find them via Google. I have a nice
whip cream dispenser that had the rubber grommet freeze because I was
making so much whipped cream (right). I paid something like $40 for it.
I wanted a new grommet for it, and I used Google to find a store in
Pennsylvania that sold me the grommet for something like $2. I ordered 2
boxes of whipped cream to offset the shipping, and in less than a week I
was back to making whipped cream!
I could have never, ever have found a $2 part without Google.
Google is a monopoly for a reason. Why would you need more than one
place to find all of the questions you have?
* Sun boxes used to run the root DNS servers, and that is were they got
the idea that they were the "dot in dot com". IBM took over that role in
2000 or so, I'm not sure if they still have it or not.
What are you talking about? If you don't like search engines indexing your website, just put a robots.txt file on it and block all of the search engines' spiders. (My site blocks MSNBot, hee-hee.) You can make it more detailed and only let them index certain parts of your website. As for all of the other people's websites, that's up to their webmasters whether they want to get indexed. They probably do because search engines bring a lot more value (i.e. traffic) than they "leech".
I find that google blows away most commercial sites for finding content on those sites. I use google when looking for products on web store sites. In that respect at least, google is doing them a favor. I'm finding products I want and buying them because Google is there; many of the sites have crappy or nonexistant searching capabilities. Heck, I've tested some; I can be looking at a product I found on their site, and I can type in the words that are in the name of the product into the site's search, and it will tell me there's no such product. Ridiculous.
How about implementing a decent search engine on the site so I don't have to go to Google to find an answer to my question. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to IBM or HP to look for something other than drivers and had to go to Google to get my answer. Usually this involved how to diagnose a problem but sometimes it involves a manual.
Improve your FAQ. Ever look at an FAQ on a site (if they bother to have one?) In the end their answer is usually: call us. If I wanted to call you I would have done so in the first place. I'm on your site because I want to find it myself. Give me the answer. That's what a FAQ is for.
Put your companies mailing address on your site. This is a very annoying 'feature' that companies fail to do. If I want to snail mail you I shouldn't have to call you to get the information. Granted, I could always do a search for your address on Google but then that defeats the original purpose for my visit to your site.
Shall I continue or are these concepts too difficult to implement?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
After I RTFA, I basically got one thing out of it. The writer was complaining that unless you keep working at a website you made, you are going to not earn as much money.
I've got news for him - you can't expect to earn money out of nothing. I know some people manage to do it, and good for them. But its not something you can expect to do. If you don't work on improving your site, and others do, its not the search engine companies' fault that people will be more interested in their work and so they can afford more on advertising.
I do see his point - the search engines will get paid more because your work improves, and other's work improves. But this is not something that is unique to search engines. It is part of advertising in general. The larger a company gets, the more it can put into advertising, which means the competing companies need to keep up with them and put more into advertising themselves. It works in a bit of a different way, but its the same concept.
It doesn't matter what advertising it is - TV, Radio, Newspaper, Search Engine - the way the companies make their money is the same. Google, microsoft, yahoo, etc. are not doing anything new here, they are just brining proven concepts to a new medium. Why do we critisize them for it? If anything we should be critisizing the people who have drummed it into many a programmer that once you've written something, you shuoldn't need to maintain it.
I want to be on google. Thus I will google bomb.
Now I don't want to be on google, robots.txt.
I simply don't understand the premise of this article. It's ridiculous.
His analysis is sound, insofar as it goes, but it misses a key fact by assuming that advertising the web site is the purpose of advertising. Sure, making sales through a web site is a good thing, but the important part is "making sales", not the mechanism through which they're made. So what? Well, if advertising my products through AdWords becomes more expensive per unit dollar solde than a competing medium (the paper, the yellow pages, television, radio), then...I'll use that competing medium. In fact, FTD is reducing its spend on Google in order to pursue other media, precisely because those media are more cost effective. Google is not a monopoly in the advertising market yet, and doesn't have pricing power. Neilson ignores that.
What a bunch of FUD.
"The web sites that create content are now simply fodder for the Xs' revenue stream."
Replace "X" with just about any internet related technology. How many fewer computers would Dell sell if it wasn't for the internet and how does that affect content providers? Where is the statistically significant correlation? Sort of like comparing the inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.
Search engines only "leach" off of sites that seem to base their whole business model on users clicking through all over the place and seeing a pile of ads. Search engines allow users to find just the content they desire and no other, thus removing a significant number of "ad impressions."
This isn't an issue for sites that truly publish useful or innovative content. The search engines simply allow users to find this content.
It really only hurts news agencies and sites who simply parrot the AP Wire or Reuters instead of providing their own unique content. A news site that has the same article word-for-word as 100 other news sites gets boned, but the news site with something unique will via the search engine draw and maintain visitors.
IMHO, the only people complaining about this are those out for a quick buck.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
I just gotta say it anyway: some of Jacob Nielsen's more obvious tips have been good, but cases like this shows the man's a hack.
It's just one too many paranoid Alertbox articles than I'm ready to take.
Search engines are what binds the Internet together, and this is what makes them so successful. But as a victims of their success, now everyone wants a piece of their pie.
The music and video industry wants royalties from music/video search, ISP wants to tax them for "using their pipes", newspapers wants to tax them for posting short snippets with links to their sites.
Now Jacob Nielsen comes here and makes it not better like he's supposed to, but worse. Thanks, dude!
Every one was equal and I'm more equal than others...
Simple isn't it ?
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Sure this might be partially true. But I would wager most of the web traffic that the "victim" sites get is from search engines. I have done a fair bit of traffic analysis for my company's web page (F50 company, sells computers, take a guess....) and I know even though we have a fairly decent interface, a good percentage of traffic still comes from google.
On top of that, if you can't design a site that captures the user once they are linked in from a search engine, it is your own fault if you ask me.
I think the summary on this article missed the point of Nielsen's article---though in fairness to the article submitter, I think Nielsen's own abstract also misses the point.
The article summary says that search engines "extract too much of the Web's value." He never gives us any criterion to make such a decision, so I assume this to be a personal opinion. Personal opinion aside, I would agree with his assertion that the "advertising arms race" inherent in the pay-for-ranking system can siphon revenue---potentially a lot of revenue---from a company. Nielsen then goes on to explain several good suggestions that companies could use to counter this outflow problem. His closing idea---that successful websites need to learn how to make people come back, not how to keep them on the page for hours---is, I believe, correct. Wikipedia is a good example of this, as others have mentioned; I'm also a favor of howstuffworks.com.
I don't know why Nielsen hid a good idea in so much scaremongering language; I suspect he felt it necessary to be heard above the regular Internet "blog noise" (we're discussing the article, so I guess it worked). But scaremongering aside, this is a pretty informative article.
Take care,
Mark
There is a solution...
Before Google ads, I tried and failed to get advertising support because it was such a niche and there did not seem to be much interest during the dot-bust. Granted, I did not have much time to pursue advertising support but I did try. I agree with the author of the article that pursuing your own clientele is important. The plan has always been to be able to get advertising support from the players as the FOSS in medicine industry continues to mature. Doing Google Ads now was a much-welcome bridge to that future.
-- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
Next he claims that just when you are making money after you hyped your article with a massive advertising campaign your competitor will do the same because he doesn't want to loose forcing you to run an ad campaign again.
Wow. How odd. Lucky nothing like that happens in the real world.
Coca Cola has just the one ad campaign in the late 1900's (or is that 1800's) and has been coasting ever since.
OF COURSE NOT Gee whiz. News flash, if you sell your product through paid advertising then you got to keep paying to advertise. More and more and more and every time there will be some new upstart who runs an ad campaign for a similar product forcing you to do it again.
What the fuck do search engines got to do with it? This is just plain old advertising.
No this fucktard has just learned that pay-per-click advertising has better statistics (you can actually tie the ad to the sale) and then used some magic math to prove that ad costs can sky rocket. Someone tell Intel. How much are they spending on that new logo again?
But you can tell this guy is a nutjob. He seems to think that because software/service X is available for free this will stop competition. Gee, look at my tagline for two free editors. Now google for other text editors. How many do you find? Rounded to the nearest hundred.
The bubble is over, there is no new economy, all the same old rules still apply. Oh and it says a lot about Jakob Nielsen that quality of your product doesn't seem to enter into equation. The only determining factor in how many people come to your site is how much you pay for ads and the only factor in how much you sell is your site.
Eheh. Explain this to google please. Exactly where did google advertise? Thank you.
Of course even an idiot gets some things right. Who here uses slashdot own search or uses google to search slashdot for old stories (oh and the third option for editors "Search old stories? What for?"). It is far easier to google with a question the find an answer site. Gamefaqs.com is about the only site I search directly.
If you don't want people to search you via google then A disable google from indexing you or B improve your goddamn site so the fucking search works properly.
Oh and if you don't like paying several dollar per google ad click, then don't. Word of mouth can work wonders if you are selling quality. There are plenty of companies that never advertise. They survive because they are the best and everyone knows it or they are so common people don't even think about it anymore. Anyone else. Welcome to the world of the ad agency sucking every last dollar out of you that they can. It is their way of making a living.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I call BS. I remember the days before good search engines (remember Webcrawler cira 1996?). It was near impossible to find what you were looking for in a reasonable amount of time.
Without search engines most content on the internet wouldn't be seen by anyone.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
In addition to paid search listings, websites also often receive search traffic from free, so-called organic listings. These visitors are obviously no problem, except that you can't count on them as a sustainable strategy, since organic listings can change without notice.
So in his eyes there are two major ways to be discovered on the web -- paid listings (according to him: "search engines") and free listings (but these aren't reliable).
And his problem is that competition inflates the prices they have to pay to get listed on "search engines".
My problem with understanding this is quite big -- all listings but the AdWords on e.g. Google are free and they use a PageRank model to put popular sites on top. The main space of search sites, yes, even that of MSN, is usually not dedicated to paid listings. Maybe around ~10-20% per page is. They're also usually clearly marked as ads so customers know they may not be directly related to their searches, but how much they paid.
I think he's grossly oversimplifying things to make his case. And if Google's unpaid listings are unreliable in the way his site may drop off the list because other get more popular, I think I'd rather side with the search engine for encouraging him to improve their service and make it more popular.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Hmm, and here I was thinking that I'd actually add a little search box on my web site to search my site's content via Google.....
Who's leeching whom?
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
i can't get my head around this...website owners complaining of search engines indexes....search engine indexes are 95% of the reason I have found websites....maybe i should never go to his website and he will be happy...there is only 3 websites that i check for "interesting links", the rest is google and i am on the internet a lot.
And how do I find out about all this wonderful content? If content exists in the internet and nobody knows it's there, does it really exist?
In the long run, every time companies increase the value of their online businesses, they end up handing over all that added value to the search engines. Any gain is temporary; once competing sites improve their profit-per-visitor enough to increase their search bids, they'll drive up everybody's cost of traffic.
This is a simple fact of economics: There is no profit in a competitive market. (That is the economics definition of competitive - not the pedestrian definition.) The point is that you have to differentiate yourself from the competition in order to (successfully) charge a premium for your product - either through website improvement, or having a different product that you're selling.
The fact that the proliferation of auction models has made many markets more competitive is a fabulous thing. If you draw the conclusion that the author should have drawn, it becomes ainfully clear: search engines make it harder to be a retail "squatter" and make money. (That is, to run a site that doesn't have any innovation in either site design or product.)
There is one valid economic objection that the author could have made (but didn't). That is that the web advertising market is asymmetric. Google has a near monopoly (AFAIK), which allows it to extract (close to) the full consumer surplus for the ads it sells (the site makes $4 per visitor. Given these assumptions, the site can pay up to $3.99 for each click on its search engine ads...) This wouldn't be the case if there were substantial competition for Google (and I might honestly be wrong about the lack of competition - I just haven't heard of any).
My point is that there might have been a substantial argument to be made about the search market, but if there was, the author failed to make it.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
I think the headline alone misses the whole point of the Internet. People put content and product out on the Internet - many as the sole means for business - in hopes of others finding that content and product. Without centralized places to go to find those virtual stores, they would be bankrupt in no time at all (unless of course they have an established brick and mortar presence). The Internet doesn't have street signs and zip codes - the playing field is quite level for all. Therefore, since nobody knows how to get anywhere, where do they go? Right, search engines - which are nothing more than a telephone book for the web. Now, imagine you build a super highway that is the most highly traveled road in the world. Don't you think the billboards would be pretty lucrative places to advertise? The very same concept exsists with Google and Yahoo - their high volume of traffic means great spots for advertising. If you don't want to advertise, don't. But, then again, you will find yourself lagging behind your competition. Search engines don't go out and force companies to advertise. They are lucrative business models because companies are continually seeking out new ways to drive customers to their product. End of story...
See that box of ads next to your google search resuls mister Nielsen? I got a little secret to tell you. Not all of them paid the same amount to be there. Neither do people just select the top result. They look at the ads to see wich one best seems to meet their needs.
Successfull advertising != spending all your profits on it.
The apple and orange comment is also very true as he talks about content being leeched before going to b2b sites. Does B2B sites have content nowadays? I thought this was going to be an article about new sites having their stories hotlinked by google and people no longer visiting the sites on their own.
This is true. When was the last time you actually entered or selected a bookmark of a newssite vs following /. story link or a google result?
As for the alternatives. Yup, sounds like spam to me. It thought I had seen the end of the goddamn newsletter and having to explain again and again why it is not a good idea to send everyone who ever submitted their email a 1mb html mail.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't know about anyone else, but I only use search engines to find the site that has what I am looking for. I don't go around typing random URLs in to try and find a site. I type what I am looking for into the search engine, and it responds with a list of sites that match my criteria and the context (usually) of the site. If the context I'm looking for isn't on the first page, I refine my search.
You wouldn't do research in books looking only at the index (or even a library's card catalog system) would you?
So, basically, what he's saying is that "Anything you do to increase profits or reduce expenses will be matched by your competitors and you will never be able to get a leg up on them." But, that's no surprise. In a competitive environment you are just not going to be able to get huge profits. But, that has nothing really to do with search engines or the electronic world at all.
Increasing advertising is not always the best way of increasing revenue -- another way is to cut prices. If you sell twice as much at 30% margin than you did at 40% margin, you come out better. Of course, then your competitor goes to 20% and you go to 10% and then your competitor goes to 5% &c. Merchants in a competitive environment will ALWAYS spend their margin trying to beat their competition.
Of course, after a certain point, a merchant won't cut any more -- he'll just quit and do something different. So, there is some natural floor margin.
It's a two-way street. You could say that content-providers leech from search engines by way of hits. If it weren't for such excellent indexing, web sites would be as disconnected now as they were in the early 90s.
Sure for simple information people might not view the site at all, but let's be honest, most times when you do a google search you are clicking the link to the site.
I mean, maybe things such as the google set generator and the calculator and such rely on underlying web results to calculate their answers, but how is this such a bad thing for content providers?
Do you really want people that only wanted a single image of the NYC skyline or an answer to how many weeks are in a year visiting your website anyway?
I suppose if your business is advertising that these numbers may add up in potential ad revenue, but for a regular business these customers visiting for simple information would represent little to no value for the business.
You are then working on the off chance that the same person that found your site through "number of weeks in the year" site also would then be interested in your calculator product or some such thing, which I highly doubt is true.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Mr Blobby. Google for it.
The glorydays of the BBC are past, even then it was merely turning out some nice series but a horrible news service that was biased as hell and understrict control by the goverment. They had to admit several times that they withheld news or misrepresented the news according to the wishes of the goverment. And that is just the ones found out.
Offtopic as hell but I hate people who glorify the BBC without actually ever having to live with it as the only news source.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I will probably never find your site... so go ahead and block search crawlers if you feel you are getting screwed.
The plain fact of the matter is there is SO MUCH data on the itnernet as to make it nearly impossible for me to find your site by chance without search engines indexing and suggesting the content on a related search. I don't have time to go and independantly discover your site when looking for a topic or product, if it does not come up with a few google searches it effectivly does not exist and you get 0 revenue from me AT ALL.
One question: when did "search engine" get equated to "paid link placement"? The whole article seems to be predicated on the idea that the only way to get into search-engine listings is by paying for placement. If one doesn't pay for placement, the whole thesis of the article breaks down. I know I for one tend to avoid pay-for-placement search engines precisely because their results are based on payment, not relevance to me. The exception is Google, and even there I tend to look at the search results before the paid links.
Another question: the article seems to be complaining that a site can't just rest on it's laurels when other sites are improving, but when was it ever otherwise? Back in the real world when the other guys make improvements to match you and can afford to pay more for advertising then advertising rates are going to go up and you either pay them or stop advertising as much, with roughly the same results as the author's complaining about in his article.
Using robots.txt helps, and another thing is you can hide content behind clickable interfaces... Search engines only index what you allow them to index, nothing more.
Ultimately, this rent-stripping gets in the way of price competition, as there is less rent to be delivered to the consumer in time. That is, &@@&!£'s near-monopoly is costing the customer money.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Without them you're nothing unless you have some other means of garnering interest such as an MMORPG.
Community is fine for this...if you can find it. Community can be a bit myopic though.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Since the inside of your house is not designed to be - by default - accessible to anyone. The point of web pages is to have people see them. Not so for your living room.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Am I the only one that finds just about everything written by nielsen to be either blatantly obvious (and already known and understood by anyone with half a brain) or oddly nonsensical?
And, of course, regardless of which one it is... he is always willing to sell anyone 637 reasons that supposedly prove his point and/or elaborate on it. (One does wonder how many of the 637 reasons are directly implied by, or already included in one or more of the other poinst on the same list.)
I really am curious. But he never seemed the least bit insightful to me.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
Advertisers win on most hits. The potential hit ratio is pretty much predetermined, so there's little meaningful competition between search engines.
Wikileaks, no DNS
to "leech" is to grab on forcefully with suckers and never let go.
to "leach" is to wash out part of the substrate, as in "the acid rain leached the limestone until the hill crumbled."
LEACH would appear to be the correct word if the substance of the linked report says that search engines are removing monetary value from the website. it is a neutral word.
leech implies malice aforethought, as in "the leeches sucked the prize trout dry, and the annual catch of Ol' Bugeyes occurred no more on Swift Creek." if there are websites out there to posit a hue and cry over deep linking, then the search engines have not killed the whole web yet.
####
what the hooting and hollering is REALLY about is over who controls when and how you get to see content. if somebody doesn't want you to deep link, they should set a session cookie on the home page with a timer, and anybody trying to see the link without the cookie should get a page of photoshopped porn. creatively, photoshopped porn from a published picture of the CEO of the listed owner of the seeking service (if you have registered 127.0.0.1, for an example, to Halliburton addresses in the whois, you get porn of the CEO of halliburton lifted from an annual report with the animal of the day.)
that would eventually stop deep links. alternately, everybody might decide to never visit, say, the new york times website again in protest. The Community out here would make the decision on what they want to see with each click, and under whose rules... and the argument would be over.
until content providers start making it most untasteful to use search engine links, screw 'em, that's how The Community wants to use their website. change The Community if you don't like it. if The Community doesn't like you, then YOU change or die. because The Connected Internet is a function of what the users, The Community, wants.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
the NY Times sucks value from everyone by creating value from random new. news should be free.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
He's a businessman, one of three founders of a usability consulting company with six offices in the US.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
We just need a sane and balanced approach. The false dilemma between the content trust demanding absolute and open-ended copyright powers, as well as exceptions for civil liberties and human rights to enforce them, and copyright anarchists who want to abolish copyright, is ridiculous.
/.'ers want the latter - many if not most would be happy with the pre-DMCA pre-UCITA rules that have served us well enough for many years. Why is it "radical" to want to stay the same or only slightly reduce copyright powers, and not radical to want to wildly change the rules to benefit a cartel? There's no contradiction or even confusion there.
Notice, though that big companies and big money lobby for the former every day in Washington and abroad, whereas comparatively few
People have just inherently sensed what is right - that stopping speech or eliminating judicial protections to go after P2P is wrong, but limited and well-defined copyright powers are OK; that software patents are wrong, but patents in general can be useful... and so forth...
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I think what he's getting at is that businesses should hire usability experts rather than spend money on search engine advertising and optimization, obviously. It's a self-serving analysis.
BS claims that the content providers are getting a free ride over the BS broadband, and should pay for their transport costs. That was yesterday.
Now the claim is that the indexing services are getting a free ride on the backs of the content providers, and making a fortune off of other people's efforts.
Well I already pay for my broadband myself, and don't think any ISP has the right to charge double (i.e. both ends of the transaction) while degrading my BB service for those who don't pay.
I also consider indexing services a valued added proposition without which the web would be a whole lot less usable -- hence less valuable. So I feel that indexing services improve the value of the web, and not the converse.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"What about all the News sites?"
"And the filthy, filthy porn?"
- RvB
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
I agree with this post. I liken search engines to super markets who make a ton of money from charging PepsiCo for prime "shelf space" Essentially, this is what google and yahoo are doing. They are setting up prime "shelf space", ie that top of the list on the right hand side. They are setting up payment mechanisms (a super market check out stand), which of course they will take a small portion of. When I need to find stuff, I use google, sometimes those adds on the right help me. Just like when I want my favorite tortilla chips, I go to safeway. However, one promise of the 'Net was that creators of goods wouldn't have to go through a middle guy to sell goods. They could sell directly to the customer, and not have profit skimmed off the top. Imagine a world in which you couldn't find the product you were looking for unless you paid google for "compute time" . What you say, pay google for search? You pretty much are going to HAVE to go through a search engine to find stuff, and suppliers are going to HAVE to "register" in order for you to find them. It could happen, look at people who pay for CableTV and still have to watch commercials..... In short, we have to be aware at the power search companies hold, even the ones that "Don't be Evil"
If you don't like search engines caching your content have a script that displays your content in two ways:
Preview Content: mywebsite.com/preview/index.php?article=123544
Display Content: mywebsite.com/display/index.php?article=123544
Robots.txt: Don't look at my display folder
Preview displays the title, a descriptive blurb, and a link to the full content. Display is the full article. Now you get the best of both worlds.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Which one is more valuable, information produced by a company, or information about the location of the information?
Evidently, this guy has never heard of robots.txt. Of course, that only applies to the SEs that actually use it...
have them come directly to your site instead of clicking on expensive ads."
I get nothing from his article other than a conclusion that "advertising works."
I don't click on related sidebars or banner ads, and couldn't tell you the last one
I saw unless it was an annoying popover from a site I'll make a point to never visit.
Try ignoring traditional media images on tv and billboards, or a new product jingle.
Often when I am searching for certain information such as store hours or a phone number or address then this may save me a trip to the web site where the information resides. That would save bandwidth for that company while still providing customer service. That depends of course if the information I am getting is in context with what I am searching for. Often I will have to visit the site to make sure the search engine got the results that I wanted.
That kind of search was for mostly static information, stuff that rarely, if ever, changes. Most other searches for less tangible subjects almost always requires a visit to the site to make sure the information is in the context that I want. The search engine at best will wade through the site and help me zero in on that information. If a site has its own search engine I will use that as it cuts down on pages I need to view to find the information I need. At least for me and most people I know the search engine is a gateway to a site and not a replacement for one.
This argument can only be put forth by business people that are clueless. In the US, go to your local shopping mall. You'll see a collection of retailers. The draw is the mall - it helps create traffic for the stores. Every store in the mall has to report net sales to the landlord each month for the sole purpose of determining the rent the business pays. When the traffic increases, sales go up and the mall management takes a piece of that increase. Sales go down - rent goes down.
Search engines perform the same function - drive traffic to a site. When traffic increases, the cost for that traffic increases. If a web operator doesn't like that, there are other options. But in the end, the search engine will probably prove to be the most efficient.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
There should be some sort of revenue sharing as the sites are dependent on the search engines and the search engines are dependent on the sites. Without search engines the sites traffic would dwindle (atleast new user traffic) and without the sites the search engines have no value. If the search engines link to the full site page (adds, pop-ups and all the other revenue generating items) then the sites should be glad to be listed in the search engines. The user may not have gone through the six pages and their associated banner and pop-up ads to get to the article, but s/he is at the page with the article and can view the ads. Viewing one page worth of ads is better for the site than not viewing any. There should be limits on how the search engines paraphrase the pages (and possibly cache them) to make sure that the answers that the user is seeking can only be viewed by going to the actual page (perhaps a brief synopsis for search engines to display).
One of the things I am trying out is to switch my google preferences from 10 hits per page to 100 hits per page. This allows more of the ads to show up on the now much bigger "first page", in fact, for most of the stuff I search for, it looks like I get ALL the ads at once. If everyone did this it would make it a lot easier for all the producers to get onto the first page.
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
This has to be one of the most asinine comments I've seen. What value does the content have if nobody can find it? I run a website for a nonprofit company that is utterly dependent on it for its relationships with customers and the general public, and while our customer's know where to find us, the general public usually does not. If you don't want people to find your website, or the content available on it, why have it up? Hell, if you don't won't search engines listing it, look into a little something called robots.txt.
This guy might be right, just not yet.
The next generation of search engines will not return 10 results per page. Instead, they'll return an essay about the subject you asked for. They'd be foolish not to credit their sources, but users may not click those links if they get the information they need without doing so.
Take an example: I type "outlook ost to pst conversion" into Sir-Find-a-Lot. It returns an essay about how Outlook creates OST files but can't open them, so they have to be converted. So far, this is all information, and whilst it might be credited, it's not actually what I'm after (so I'm not going to click any of the links). However, the essay would go on to say "site x offers an online converter for £10, whilst site y offers software for download for £5". I'm going to click one of those two things, because at the end of the day I want to get something done.
So (in the future) this guy has a point - the people that have whittered on about crappy Outlook won't get clicks, even though their content was used to infer the essay. Those people who actually do something in the field will get the clicks, because, erm, they do something in the field.
In short, one day, information won't have the same value as the services behind it. Actually, that's already true, it's just that some people haven't realised it yet. More importantly, search engines currently only point you at information sources, so the whole point is completely moot.
The only sites that would have a significant net expense to Google are the retailers which offer little, if any, new content. B&M Retailers typically spend a large chunk of their gross profit on advertising/marketing anyways, so how is this any different?
I think this is a very valid point...the "model" being used here (by Google) can't be that much different than any other company that has managed to position itself at the headwater in a particular industry. We have power companies, telcos, cable companies, and corporate giants that own large numbers of subsidiaries. They are all in a position to artificially inflate value by dictating the terms under which that value will be administered. If the only practical access you have to a certain resources is through another entity (via the money that is paid for that access), this would seem to invite all kinds of issues that start to detract from the overall viability.
I can't count the number of blogs, ad-only sites, and other worthless pages that are formatted specifically to achieve a high placement in a Google search.
Originally, this was done with keyword spamming: filling the Keyword meta tag with "FREE BEER FREE BEER FREE BEER..." a thousand times. Soon, major search engines and directories such as Yahoo! introduced rules that rejected submitted sites with the same word occurring more than a certain number of times in the meta tag.
Then came 'stealth keyword' spamming: web pages that appeared to have a vast blank space at the bottom that was actually filled with "FREE BEER FREE BEER FREE..." in the same color as the page background.
Now it's 'splogs' (spam blogs): blogs that consist of entries like "I really like FREE BEER. I found some great FREE BEER today at a FREE BEER place where they gave me lots of FREE BEER..."
Now more than ever, search results are filled with complete crap because there are so many sites set up for the sole purpose of luring Googlers to click on their ads. It's enough to drive a person to drink. Anyone know where I can get some FREE BEER?
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
That's an outright lie, or plain ignorance. I should know, I live with an author, max wolf valerio.
r l/index=books&field-author-exact=Max%20Wolf%20Vale rio&rank=-relevance%2C%2Bavailability%2C-daterank/ 104-2424868-6408710
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-u
http://dict.die.net/leach/
3: remove substances from by a percolating liquid; "leach the soil" [syn: strip]
Just saying.
Dilute! Dilute! OK!
He's hit on a problem, but concludes the search engines are to blame, which is wrong. The search engines fill a void that consumers wanted, or else they would not exist!
I'd argue its the opposite problem... most web sites are so bad that they're not worth navigating so you have to rely on a search engine instead.
Do people rely on search engines to find stuff at Amazon? No, because Amazon's site is designed well enough to find stuff quickly and easily.
On the other hand, too many sites are not worth the effort to sift through to find what you need, so you need an outside engine to correlate the answer.
And let's not forget the most important point about the web. The power of the web for a shopper is that there are a lot of places to buy stuff. Without a search engine, that power cannot be put to use. In the long run that hurts small web sites, because you can't easily reach consumers if people don't know you're there.
I guess it's really an age old story... if you have a large mind-share, you don't need to do a lot of advertising to drive business. But if people don't know you exist, then you have to get the word out. Why is paying a search engine any more outrageous than paying a TV network to advertise your product?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Am I the only person here who is tired of Jakob Nielsen being lauded as THE usability guru of the Internet? Anyone can squawk about this technology or that programming language, but that doesn't make them the Gospel of anything. Usability to him is basically going back to HTML 1.0.
Also, I don't see why TFA seems to think all the profit would be passed on to Google. Almost by definition, companies pass cost, like the original cost of goods, shipping and handling, taxes, and a profit margin, onto their constomers. In that sense, there is no such thing as a "free" search - eventually the expense for advertising, including online advertising, will be reflected in product pricing. Perhaps for items with an inelastic curve we will see some Google driven price inflation?
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
Those would be ISP's, Domain Hosters, and Search engines.
The real problem is the owner has too HIGH a value on the content. Media Content is not really that valuable, depsite what the content creators (and yes, I am one of them) like to think. Media Content gets created by itself, without anyone paying anything for it. Yes, when you pay people, you get higher quality content, but the truth is, any real artist will create content even if no one ever paid them for it. Them same can not be said of distrbution.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Where you turn a profit. You mention Thousands of dollars over years. $2,000 over 5 years isn't a profession, it isn't even worth reporting on your taxes.
From your post it sounds like you are saying content is worthless, but the author has value. But to me as a consumer, I couldn't give to shakes of a monkey's ass over who wrote my SQL Bible, but it's content has saved me hours of head banging frustration.
Why would I pay $20 to meet the author of the book when I already have the book? Why would I pay $20 for the book when I can get it online for free? Why bother with the ebook when I can use Google to get the same information faster?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Why? Lets say I make a digital Widgit. My widgit gets adapted by hundreds of coporations around the glob and saves their companies $500 million dollars all combined. Shouldn't I as the creator of this widgit that has saved half a billion dollars be elligable for some of that money?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
So using it doesn't guarentee you anything. Nor does it protect you.
very thing we record in the studio will instantly be public domain. We'll be watching for others to take the content and redo it, and then we'll be able to use that content as well for our own gain.
What if they copyright their work?
This idea sounds great in a world where everyone who hears or uses copyright free music contributes back to the cause, but that's not the case.
By "public domain" do you mean some sort of creative commons-like license, or are you really going to produce it and then let it be used for whatever?
This is the usual "Gee, someone is making money that I don't have my hands on" reaction of a typical human primate who is literally KILLED to see anyone else in the world making a buck.
Now, I don't have a problem with someone trying to figure out how to make money off someone else's money. I DO have a problem with people who want to prevent those people from making money off someone else's money.
This has nothing to do with disliking rich people. I don't hate Bill Gates because he's rich. I hate him because he's an asshole and his company is slowing the computer revolution by putting out and locking people into CRAP.
If Neilsen is complaining that the effect of the current situation is that some Web sites with quality content will be cut off because they don't use ads and therefore the public will not find them because the public is using search engines, I find this to be a highly speculative concept. I see no evidence that the search engines are cutting anyone off.
I just put up a tiny site a couple months ago and have done NOTHING to promote it at all so far. It's just a couple pages of Microsoft Word HTML documents. Nonetheless my site was eventually found by Google and might actually turn up in the first fifty pages of results with the right key words. In fact, use the same four words in the right order as my Web site name and - likely because I'm on Craigslist - I come up as the THIRD result on the FIRST PAGE! With absolutely NO effort on my part to promote the page. Of course, whether anyone will happen to put those four words in that order on a regular basis is sufficiently unlikely that I will have to do a LOT more promotion in order to make the site useful.
But it does indicate that just because you have no ads on your page and the search engine is making some teeny tiny amount of money off my site by having it contribute to filling up their results page which is full of ads doesn't mean my site is going anywhere, up or down.
People need to be wary of "soundbite concepts" - like the notion of "intellectual property" or "the CIA CREATED bin Laden" (they didn't "create" him - they just used and helped him) or "siphoning value". These are phrases that SOUND like actual valid concepts - but they're really meaningless if you start to examine them in the light of facts based on reality. Invariably when you hear one of these soundbites, there's a hidden agenda that someone has that he doesn't want to reveal - and it usually has to do with restricting your freedom in order to enhance his.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Yeah google follows it, so does yahoo, but it's the sites that don't which cause the most problems (at least for me).
It's still true that the customers are competing in a different market from the firms, though, and will typically only use one search engine, so that companies need to pay monopoly prices for access to each slice of the available market...
Wikileaks, no DNS
Would you say "books that create content"?
How about "encylopedias that create content"?
How about newspapers? Radio stations? Newswire services? Trade rags?
In fact, none of them "create content". At most they display items that may have content of some sort.
It really doesn't help to confuse the messenger with the message, or the speaker with the messenger, or the message with the facts.
Actually, I could see a usage for this "ping" function that sort of makes me wish that it was implemented for all browsers . . .
I help run a distributed web site--our content is mirrored across multiple servers in multiple countries. To do statistics for that "site as a whole" requires statistics to be run on each server and then combined. Since the multiple servers are "owned/operated" by different people and there's nobody that has admin access on all, this doesn't happen. The last time we got accurate statistics for all our sites was back in 1999 or so.
It would be nice to have this "ping" functionality to ping a single log server each time a link is clicked, resulting in a single source to do statistics from. (The HTML pages are the same cross-site, so it could be easily done.) But some have mentioned this can be done via Javascript . . . per link? I probably should investigate that.
But I do copyright my work. I can give it away, but nobody can take it without asking. The fee to file for copyright is like $30 for a CD full of songs, so it's really a small cost, even for the little guy.
Yes, you probably will make the most money from live shows rather than CD sales. But wouldn't it stink if a good indie songwriter's work was stolen, recorded by a pre-packaged industry act, and the indie writer never saw a dime?
Record companies are becoming less and less necessary for the distribution of music. I think copyright, since it's cheap to get, actually helps level the playing field for independant artists.
Precisely, which proves there is a limited supply of what is actually wanted. Scarcity isn't only about the most abstract notion of a thing. In that case, _everything_ is essentially infinite not just in potential quantities as in digital copies, but also in actual, natural, physical occurrence. Scarcity is also about identification, production, fabrication, refinement, quality, packaging and delivery--and that applies as much to entertainment as it does to steel. You could not have, for instance, something as appallingly successful as Britney Spears without every single one of those components and at each stage there is opportunity cost and, ergo, scarcity. Oddly enough, the largess of such celebrities is precisely what makes them what they are. That is to say, there is actually a demand for the greed that creates them. Go to a "commons" distribution and they would cease to exist not just because they'd "lose" money, but because the fact that they horde so much money is actually what people are buying.
I'm not arguing about the social or legal implications of whether people feel there is justification in charging for this "content" or criminalizing the infringment/theft/whatever of it. All I'm saying is that the _economic_ argument is conveniently ignoring every component of the process but the final electronic duplication and even then, it is ignoring the resources that are being used and even more to the point is ignoring a great deal of what the product actually is in the first place.
"Content Provider" is an oxymoron because rarely do businesses (whom I presume are the complaintants) provide anything useful other than price lists.
On the other hand, search engines direct people to their 'content' - bringing potential customers to their site above and beyond what would normally transpire - thus increasing the revenue stream of these sites.
As for non-profit sites who post real content - perhaps we need a search engine that just lists these sites alone - that way the complainers wouldn't have to worry about anymore search engine directed 'visitors' or the $$ they bring.
There is a reason why the word 'moron' is in 'oxymoron' - and this article illustrates it beautifully.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
There would be no incentive to go to the work of "refining" this "infinite" product at the price of $0.00, so Britney Spears would be performing live from the front door of an Airstream at trailer park in Mobile.
So, yes, in that sense, you're 100% correct.
If I want to find information at Cisco.com, I usually use Google to find it, with site:cisco.com and whatever other terms I need, because it's usually more effective than using Cisco's own search or hierarchical indexes. In Cisco's case, they're not providing third-party advertising on their web site, though in some sense it's all advertising for Cisco's own hardware. For sites that don't want to get deep-linked by Google, it's easy to push everything with an HTTP-REFERER at Google through their front page.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most artists make their money on tour, and the big music company can't take a piece of the action.
This is crap. You don't make money on tour until one of 2 things happens: you are subsidized by a label (which expects to get recouped, so there goes your tour profits) or have been doing it for a while and have built a dedicated following (which can take YEARS)
You can't validify your position by saying "Well, they make their money on tours anyway" Touring costs A LOT of money. Gas, food, lodging, merchandise, equipment all cost money. Most artists I know who tour and aren't subsidized (and those who are) end up sleeping on floors and eating at Taco Bell every day and selling plasma for gas money. Maybe some of this is romance, but it doesnt negate necessity.
The distributors don't make money from copyright and copyright alone; they make money from payola and unfair contracts in which the artists are duped into signing. Their stranglehold on the system has little to do with copyright and everything do to with monopolies. Perhaps the copyright system allows for certain parts of this to happen, but the idea of copyright in and of itself is not what makes the large record companies 'successful'.
Your constant pushing of your own company within this section makes you come across like a snake oil salesman. You never give a clear example on HOW copyright is soley responsible for all these major labels extorting the artists. The argument doesn't take into consideration a million other factors which have created this entrenched monopoly (lack of artist education in money matters, #1). I get the impression you're just jumping on the hot topic of the day and using that to promote your own business. Not illegal or anything, but creepy, yes.
* HTTP-REFERER tells you what web page had the URL that pointed to your site. This lets you do things like pointing visitors from search engines to your front-door page while letting links from your own site access the content directly. So for instance your front door might have a registration link, or might have an index to the cool stuff on your site plus some ads and a "click here to get the page you wanted" link so that your advertisers get real click-through data instead of the readers always reading cached versions. Or maybe HTTP requests from Google and Yahoo get the version of your page with a frame of advertising, raw text, and a "See the version with the pictures here" pointer.
* CGI scripts are a very popular way to handle URLs, especially for news sites. You get a lot of control there over what the recipient gets, and can do different things for humans and robots.
The real problem I find with search engines isn't that they let readers see your content from the cache or the 2-line Google summary - it's that they create an ecosystem of other sites that aggregate information and display advertising without providing any real comment, so for instance if you want to find out technical information about a piece of consumer electronics or a type of medicine, most of the first N pages of Google results are sites that point to advertising for people who sell those things, rather than pointing to genuine content, and most of them use scummy Search Engine Optimizer tricks to rank them above the useful sites.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
For each search engine, that search engine has a near-monopoly over access to its users for the purpose of advertising.
If it were a matter of consumer rights, then yes, that would be resolvable by switching engines. What can the advertiser do to get the consumer to switch?
Wikileaks, no DNS
If it weren't for search engines (google) finding things for me then as far as I'm concerned their site might as well not exist.
If I can find your site, you might somehow get revenue from my using it.
If I can't find your site, I can't use it and you're not getting squat.
Leeches are a type of parasite. Being indexed - and thereby receiving traffic from - a search engine is by no means a parasitic relationship. It's clearly symbiotic. If what they were looking for was so simple that it actually appeared in the search results themselves then it probably wasn't worth that much anyway. Just a little tidbit of information. If that's all your site provides then you're probably not providing much to begin with.
Sounds to me like he's just jealous that there's more money in search based advertising than the sites they're being found by. Waaah. It's a classic middleman business model.
Speaking in the most general terms, if you can control the stream of goods or services from the provider to the consumer and you benefit more than the provider or the consumer. See phone companies, cell phone companies, ISPs, search engines, *AA et al.
Question everything
that search engines are sucking out too much of the Web's value, acting as leeches on companies that create the very source materials the search engines index.
Speaking for the people who build the Internet, and with all due respect for the fact that according to the blurb you may once have not had your head in your ass, may I say, "Fine. You don't like it, leave. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out." I'm sick and tired of people whining "but I don't like the way the internet works, we should put knowledge into more restrictive silos so I can charge admission." Bite me. Noone told you to publish your work on a system that was expressly designed to make copies. Piss off. We don't need you. We would all much rather have the internet without you than the internet with you and some new goddamned law that ridiculously overreaches the spirit and letter of copyright law.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
... much the way that air (in the form of drag) is the number one enemy of flight. The thing is, it also provides lift and feeds the engines. Without it, there would be no flight.
Like others have said: if you don't like it, publish a restrictive robots.txt and see what happens to your business. Yes, there are those who will find the answer in Google's summary and not even visit, but for every one of them, there are probably ten who click through and visit,* and without the search engine, they never would have visited in the first place.
C'mon, Jakob, put your money where your mouth is: publish a super-restrictive robots.txt and tell us in a year how you're doing.
Like the man said: "I know half my advertising budget is wasted. I just don't know which half."
* Source: my ass, (c) 2006.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
...that Jakob Nielson is sucking out too much of the web's value, and is a leech on the industry second only to John C. Dvorak.
It looks to me like search engines are now very much like malls from a financial standpoint. For those who don't know, here's the quick version.
The mall developer spends a lot of money building something (and maintaining it!) so that people will want to come and spend time there. All that foot traffic is noticed by companies with things to sell, so they contract to open a store.
What many people don't realize is that many businesses not only pay a set fee for renting the space in the mall, they also pay a percentage of their actual monthly sales revenue. A successful mall developer makes most of the profit from what is sold by all of the many businesses in the mall.
I think this is Jakob's main point about what is happening with search engines. Without realizing it, when we shop on the Internet, we are giving most of our money to Google and Yahoo, NOT to the companies that actually develop products and services. Since all successful businesses take much of the their profit and put it back into development, this will be a huge loss for all of us over time.
Again, for those who don't know, go back to the mall example. Ever notice how apparently busy stores that have been at malls for 10 years, or 15 years, suddenly close their doors? Often, it's because their lease agreement is up, and it's time to renegotiate. The owner of the major mall in my town (he's on the Forbes 500 list) has a very simple formula for renegotiation - he triples the base rent. Like it or leave it, that's how it works. It's not about the stores (whether or not they are good, have good employees, give good service) or about the customers (do they find it convenient, like the service, etc.) - it's about what profits the mall owner.
The negative comments about the cost of advertising go double for Google and Yahoo - they combine both advertiser and real estate owner. If you don't buy "space" in the form of ads, you simply won't be seen and you will have no internet business. How long business owners will put up with this is anyone's guess.
How can the content provider stay in business, since I can't find his site. The author seems to not know how the web works. Without sites like Google or Yahoo, or thier ilk, which people like me use to find things, there would be no good directory to all the content out there. Then, we'd be stuck with only advertizements to find our way, leaving us with the same problem that has Television in such a funk, 300 channels with only 15 programs, none of them any good.
Thanks, but I like the current system better. If you want to force me into your straitjacket because you think it'll increase your personal revenue, you can get along without people like me. Look what that attitude has been doing for the record companies. Sales down 30 to 40 percent, profits down more than that, and all they can do is scream 'Piracy' and then act to make things worse. I'll be glad when they have finally put themselves out of business. In the meantime, I just get along without thier wares. No downloading, just no purchases too. I'm fine with that. Amature bands are really not worse than the heavily advertized stuff.
Some 'content providers' want to be in the same boat. Let them. The sooner they are out of business, the better.
Maybe the search engines should let sites 'opt out', create a list of sites their crawlers will avoid. Then, they can have thier freedom. Without customers. I wonder if there'd be any takers.
Many people (myself included) now use search engines instead of bookmarks.
Its quicker to search google (cmd-L, tab, type, enter) than it is to search bookmarks _on my own computer_. In fact, I often only bookmark a site so that the address will complete in the URL bar (if I can sort of remember it). Otherwise, I just type something close to the name in google and its there. Instant.
Rent:
Real-estate rents are a form of economic rent, and there's a similar argument that landlords will, ceteris paribus, extract the additional income-earning potential of a given location. Google's feat is nothing particularly new, though it's something to think about.
try using it.
mmmm... I got the bus into work this morning. That bus line has a near monopoly over the supply of its passengers to the advertiser as well. The trouble here is that the narrower the circumstances which are required in order to make the "monopoly" term credible, the less force the accusation has. My local greengrocer has a near monopoly over the sale of turnips to people who happen to be in his shop. So what?
Or rather the lack of [market forces].
Point I was making is that market forces raised google to its current pre-eminence over better funded and better established rivals. It did so in large part because of Google's approach to advertising. Were google forced into a more advertiser friendly stance, they might wind up losing their position to another company who adopted Google's approach to search and advertisers. Of course, that's what a lot of people want. Mainly because they want Google's place in the market.
Speaking of wants, what is it that you want, anyway? What do you need Google to do? I mean if you asked me that of Microsoft, I'd probably say something like "open their APIs (for real this time) adopt open standards for thier file formats, and stop bullying smaller companies"
What is it you want of Google?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!