Earlier this week Danny Sullivan and many others noted that MSN and ASK did a much better job of reporting the oscar winners, than Google did. After doing some due diligence Matt Cutts of Google noticed that the official Oscars page was returning a 500 error which was reason google was having a problem. I’ll take Matt at his word that this was the case. However what this did was expose a potential weak spot in Google’s armor. So I’m going to engage in a bit of a parlor game now, and lets play a bit of “what if” specifically “what if google was wrong?”
Google has a unique business model, for the sake of clarity let’s get right down to it, Google makes money by copying your content analyzing it and displaying advertising around it. Sure they solve the important and necessary problem of making things findable on the net, and they should be rewarded for it, but lets not forget without the publishers Google doesn’t exist.
What if the publishers decided to get together and play a nice little trick on Google. Using a bit of predictive SEO by looking at the history of Google’s holiday logo’s you could be relatively comfortable assuming there will be a holiday logo for July 4th this year. What if all the publishers who rank for those terms decided to play a little trick on Google, what if they did a bit of IP delivery and fed Google some special content, that was completely wrong. What if the snippets on Google said “July 4th is the day Great Brittan Celebrates Victory over the American Colonies”. Normal users clicking through would see the correct content, but Google still displays the incorrect information. Doing a postmortem Google could come back with how this was an evil plot by the publishers, but how many “Google Goofs on July 4th” blog posts do you think there would be, and do you think the man on the street wants to know or be bothered with the intricacies of cloaking and crawling? In their eyes Google got it wrong, end of story.
Let’s move up the food chain, what if the major newspapers across the United States got together and planned a one day information strike against Google. What if the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times and every other big paper had gotten a little sick and tired of living off the table scraps Google was giving them and blocked all thier crawling bots for one day. What do you think the general public would say when they checked out Google news and saw only stories from second and third tier publishers, while Yahoo News and Live News were perfectly fine. What do you think the homepage of Techmeme would look like, and just how much sympathy do you think there would be for Google?
Of course none of this will ever happen, because the suits sitting at the board room tables of newpapers lack the intestinal fortitude and cajones to stand up to Google, but it is fun to imagagine what if. Unless of course you’re sitting in Mountain View California in a bean bag chair bathed in the light of a lava lamp, because if you are, this story probably sent a cold shiver of fear and reality right down your spine.
Related posts:
- Seth Is Wrong On Paid vs Free Journalism I’ve been writing about thinking critically recently and the Malcolm...
- How Bing and the Wall Street Journal Could Screw Google In the past week there’s been a lot talk about...
- Google Needs to Change It’s Conference Presentation Policy I learned quite a few things at SMX West last...
{ 14 comments }
Has Google become the next Microsoft already? The company everyone loves to hate but still uses on a daily basis.
I personally hope so, will make this SEO field that much more interesting. Plus who doesn’t love a little internet marketing drama?
Michael,
I love your “what if” posts, the last paragraph painted a pretty funny picture.
well, sure. if the vendors that anyone relies on conspired against and sabotaged one player in any market, that player would likely be hurt. not sure what kind of revelation this is. if i earned your trust as a web developer, and you let me make updates to your site on the back end, i would be in a position to screw you out of advertising dollars.
I agree that it would probably never happen, but you sometimes see massive organized one day “send a message” protests attacking various monopolies.
If Google continues further in the direction of being a publisher and pimping their own stuff, you might find publishers discussing such actions – though who wants to bite the hand that feeds them?
Publishers could set a message to “Google doesn’t realize how much it needs us” by:
- reset all images in Google search to images of that message
- reset all their title tags for googlebot
- reset all the meta descriptions for googlebot
- pop the message up for any google referral to their site
- change their ads to the images with the message for all Google referrals
- change the default text in their google custom search boxes
- put an intro message on all their videos on youtube
- change the description on all their youtube videos
- write a blog post on this topic to attack Google news and Google blog search
Could you imagine what a search user’s experience would be like if they did all this?
Until someone comes up with an easier way to find relevant content on the Internet nothings gonna change. The social web is quickly becoming a more passive way for people to get the information they need. In stead of searching for articles on search I can just watch Twitter and find good stuff like this
Actually Bill Gates and his wife are in the board room of some newspapers
Cool post. This “what if” history makes me think like Andre(above). When will ppl think that Google isn’t cool anymore? I don’t know when but I know that every company has a timeframe into the history, maybe Google’s frame is ending. Let’s see next years.
Actually, this is not so what if at all, if you have a look at South Korea. Naver holds the top spot because they control a pretty large chunk of the published content through their geocities/wiki-like properties, which have been very popular for years.
And Naver sticks it to those pesky data crawlers: Goog is completely disallowed via robots.txt. That way Naver will never ever lose it#s market share.
If all those newspapers blocked crawlers for a day exactly two things would happen:
a) Google, which doesn’t run ads on Google News, wouldn’t lose a dime, and
b) The newspapers, who sell ads by the thousand, would lose a pile of money as their traffic collapsed for the day.
So basically you’re advocating another self-defeating empty gesture. Yay.
I get some good Info about google
and the logo history is nice
thanks
or, if all the major publishers, and if your could push it on all the webmaster forums to get a huge number of little guys on board, added a meta robots NoIndex tag on everything. Poof! goes Google’s index.
But, reality is they have us by the balls. When many/most websites are getting 50% or more of their traffic from Google, and traffic equals revenue, there would never be enough people willing to bite the hand that feeds it. But what a story it would be if they did.
@Euroweb, interesting info about Naver. South Korea is kind of like it’s own little bubble on the net. The market itself is quite different and Naver does it’s best to keep it that way.
I love this post, I have never really thought about Google this way before. You paint an extremely vivid picture of just hoe vulnerable Google could be, that is of course if everyone else was to play along. Ultimately I have these same what if scenarios about our current government. Sadly, I do not think anyone would ever make this stand.
what if the question is never exist,what if Google still be there dominate the internet for the next 100 years,what if Google become “synonym of internet”what if Google bigger then ever,what if Google can “search” a secret we have buried deep on the locker room-will you sue it ,what if the thread to be this thread the comment must be the different then today
What if Google was wrong?? Well,i guess that would mean a lot of web site around the world would fall victim also, seeing as thought 9 out of 10 sites follow specifications set by Google in terms of development, in order to achieve top rankings. If that was all wrong then….Well….I guess that would mean a lot of web based development business would have to adapt quick.
If Google never existed, now that is a good one. I guess there would have been another bright spark who would have eventually thought up the idea with another name and that would be the Google we all know and love today.
Comments on this entry are closed.