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Gauging Google's Gaffes
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at some of the recent faux pas of Google and what implications they might have. The articles's conclusion: They should hire a chief marketing officer to avoid such gaffes. From the article: 'Recent missteps that have whipsawed or irked investors include the inadvertent release of sales projections and an agreement to censor its own search results in China. Then on Mar. 8, Google used a vaguely worded blog on its site to disclose a settlement of as much as $90 million in a case concerning click fraud. That came days after the company said the case was without merit and told investors the impact of click fraud on advertisers is immaterial.'"
businessweek.com now has a PageRank of 0.
Don't know if they advertise their "chief" positions, but it looks like they want a whole marketing department.
Gone are the days when Google was just a tadpole startup company with little more than a unique name. Over the years, the company has proven its worth time and time again with technology advancements cool new features. Until very recently I too was a hardcore Google fan... I was in love with the company that vowed to change the world, and succeeded.
We're all familiar with the recent news about Google's policies on privacy, finance, and the Department of Justice. And, it has admittedly made a few mistakes. But who are we to argue? Isn't the company successful? Aren't they doing what the set out to do -- change the world? In a nutshell: YES... I may be disappointed that Google does things a little differently than I expected, but isn't the end result that I have cool new and "free" technologies... and isn't their stock still work a lot more than their IPO days?
All of these thoughts are SOMEWHAT comforting... but I've started to develop somewhat of a love / hate relationship with them. Very recently (a few days ago) I fell into some sort of keyword promotion site over optimization scam. There is a company that wrote code that a person can insert into their websites in order to "show the location" of who's browsing their sites. This code had a cleverly embedded keyword in it that made a vague reference to "MySpace.com." As a result of including such code on my site, I was getting A LOT of Google hits.. and people were asking me how they could do the same thing. I answered by posing a copy of the code on my website... and then I got hit by a Google Site Ranking Penalty... something that I did not know even existed! Now, I am trying to recover my site's ranking and I'm not even sure how to do this.
Prior to this experience I thought Google was great... but it appears to me that much of their company is "automated" and that my site somehow tripped some automated flags and hence automatically punished me... for something someone else did. So, in the end isn't it Google's responsibility to protect the small end user from abuses of their automatic systems?
I personally won't suffer any great loss from my sites loss in status, but its just that -- a loss in status... and frankly its quite annoying. Luckily for me there were a few lessons learned:
1. I enjoy posting on Slashdot more than on my blog because people actually read it.
2. I know know how to avoid Search Engine Optimization Errors.
So, there you have it... that's the story of my love / hate relationship with Google.
--Matthew Wong
http://www.themindofmatthew.com
Great. It's been a while since I read 750 comments with the words "don't be evil."
Google should just keep doing what it wants and ignore the people in New York who seem to think they can't be ignored...
Ahh, so they should continue to misrepresent information to shareholders? They should reap the financial benefits of the system but not be held accountable by the same system? Remember, "the investors" aren't just the guys trading in NY, there are tons of folks and organzations that invest other folks money that are also "investors" and they are being just as irked and feel like Google is not operating is a straight forward manner.
It continues to amaze me that crap that Google does is seen as innovative and being a maverick shaking up the establishment, but the same deeds done by other companies would be universally condemned. If M$ did similar stuff everyone would be all up in arms. It's funny what cult of personality will do for you, that and a catchy tag line "do no evil". Reminds me of the schlocky 80's flick where Dolf Lundgren plays the alien that blows people away while stating (quite deadpan may I add) "I mean you no harm". I picture Dolf with the words "Google" tatooed to his head and all the gFanBoys drooling while mesmerized and chanting "I mean you no harm" while Dolf casually blows them into oblivion, all the while the other gFanBoys stating that "he must of deserved it".