I came across this one at Weblog Without Honor or Humanity. A good read, sparked by this post, and this reaction, both from the Adam B blog.


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Adam, from Google, responds in this heartfelt way:



Almost brings tears to your eyes. The weird thing is these guys really believe they are doing this to 'give back', and not to 'make money'. Adam has spent most of his life working for huge software companies like Microsoft. And now, just in time to cash in on the IPO stock options, he's moved to Google. Give me a break please. I don't mind people working to make money, for companies that are interested in making money, but I do mind when they can't even be honest about the facts.

Google doesn't 'give back', it offers a product that brings in enough traffic to generate income from their ad revenues. And there's been more than a little speculation that in the time preceding, during, and now following, the IPO, google in fact manipulated their results in such a way to force record numbers of people to buy their adwords. Which just by chance created a record profit just before the IPO, just in time to drive stock prices up as high as they could go. Give back? Please, be serious.

The gift economy is not about your company making huge amounts of money, getting billions in stock sales, don't try to distort something that's really good into something that helps line your pocket books, that's completely disgusting, these corporate software people are almost surreal in how they see themselves and the world.

Just as I thought, Google is going down the same exact road Microsoft went down, it was getting more and more obvious this year, now they are hiring MS guys so they don't have to figure that road out all for themselves. Sad but predictable.
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to be honest..these days google's serps suck the big one. very inconsistent. i'm seeing alot of these garbage auto-generated pages with search engine listings, some downright spammy stuff. haha myname.com was the #1 listing for the search of my name b4, now it is like #4, to a few 4yr-old+ message board posts.

yahoo, has gotten much better. msn, changed a bit, sometimes they're good, sometimes they suck.
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Mike, I'm seeing more and more of that kind of junk too. The real problem with Yahoo isn't the SERPs in my opinion, it's the fact that they just don't seem to have enough room in their index to handle all the pages of the web. You can see this easily, they will drop for no reason 90% or more of your site's pages, it's all very random.

I think they are out of room, just like Google probably was and maybe still is now. So they just throw out some pages, let in some new sites, it's all kind of odd to see.

Hopefully, but don't keep your fingers crossed, Yahoo will get their systems upgraded, definitely hasn't happened yet, though there was a big algo tweak, great for us... :-)

MSN beta is interesting, but it's a beta, changing all the time, so there's not a lot I can conclude, some of my sites are doing really well in it, for stuff I've tried to do well in for years, others aren't that great, but I don't see many of the results as being weak, some definitely are downright useless, but others are totally useable.
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Our combined Yahoo/MSN traffic is now more than our Google traffic, Mike

So you're not the only one getting annoyed at google I think. Like your language on the issue though, ha ha, all these people spend all this time minutely analyzing Google, they ignore Yahoo and MSN beta almost completely, there's 3 search engines out there.

Personally, I'd be using yahoo instead of Google much more if they would just stop that stupid redirector page that forces a new tab for each 'next page' click in the serps, unless I manually right click and select 'open in this tab', that's on Firefox tabs.
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well with yahoo, i dont have as much of a problem with some site only having the index in. usually the results give me what i want, so i really don't fret if it brings me to a site where i only have to click another link or two to find what i'm looking for.

i really just wanna see some consistency. even as just a browser of the web, i get annoyed with the inconsistency of google search these days. it's like i can search for something twice within a matter of less than an hour and get totally different results. it's frusturating and ridiculous. I also am quite fond of yahoo's new layout. Another thing i've found is that while google may push more traffic, the quality of yahoo traffic is much higher (in other words, it converts more)
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