Wherefore Art Thou Google?
Wherefore Art Thou Google?

Wherefore Art Thou Google?

These days, I have a love/hate relationship with Google.  If you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d one day feel similarly about Google as I did about Microsoft, I would have laughed in your face. Now…well…

Where It All Began

I still remember it so clearly.  It was 1998, and I was doing some freelance graphic design.  My client wanted something very specific, and I was searching for a brushed aluminium texture.  But I just wasn’t finding what I needed. At Sunday lunch with the family, an uncle of mine, (a programmer as it happens), suggested I try this new search engine.

I went home, dialled up, (yes, dial-up) and found exactly what I needed on the very first search.  And that was it.  I never really used another search engine in all the years since.

Sure, I keep Wolfram|Alpha and DuckDuckGo ready on the side, in case the day ever comes that I want to abandon Google, but for the last 15 years, Google has been my go-to search provider.

An Evolving Company

Of course, over those 15 years, Google itself evolved considerably.  From being focused on doing only search, but doing it better than anybody else, they have inevitably moved into other online spheres as the need to make it a viable company grew.  And in the end, that’s probably what affected both my perception of them, and the user experience.

My perception of Google remained almost entirely positive for many of those years.  It was only when I really started working in this field that it began to change.  And I might even be able to determine the tipping point.  I read a great article in the Search Marketing Standard discussing a major change in AdWords (at the time) that impacted the Quality Score of a lot of long-running, good quality campaigns, and how it affected the businesses that were running them.

And I realised that to a large extent, Google had plenty of businesses by the short and curlies.

Sure, the net is full of stuff about how you should never rely on one traffic source, but in the majority of countries (and perhaps the majority of companies) it simply isn’t practical.  A +90% domination of the search market (by Google) is pretty standard in most English-speaking countries.  So it’s easy to say “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” but it’s not necessarily easy to accomplish.

Social Alternatives

The rise of social media has started to provide some more accessible alternatives, (my thoughts on social media marketing will be the subject of (many) future posts), but even marketing via these mediums is influenced by (and hopes to influence) SEM.  And things like Hummingbird and G+ are probably blurring the lines even more.

As for the practicality, well…there are powerful arguments in favour of social marketing.  But with a few notable exceptions, I don’t see it as a particularly effective sales platform.  To a large extent, whether it is wise or not, many many companies rely on Google in one form or another to drive traffic and engender sales.  Which gives them a potentially uncomfortable amount of power, even if they never wanted it.

A Corporation Is A Corporation

Google is a corporation. That’s something we always have to keep in mind.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  But ultimately they are responsible to a board and shareholders with predictable (and understandable) results.

Google, like Microsoft, needs to make money.   And like I said, there’s nothing wrong with that.  I’m not some communist, (not usually anyway), and I understand and accept that as a publicly traded company, revenue is the big yard-stick.  “Do No Evil” was only ever a very unofficial motto.  And when principles come into contact with the world of IPO’s, quarterly results, stock prices and all those other capitalist marvels, they tend to have to be happy with second place.

SEO & The Bottom Line

The bottom line is the bottom line.  And when it comes to SEO, there isn’t much profit in it for the big G.  And the better we get at convincing them to rank us well, the less profit there is.  (I suppose there is some, driving people to sites with AdSense etc. but it doesn’t really stack up to the 80 or 90% of earnings that AdWords generates.)

So the harder it is to optimise organically, the better Google probably likes it. (Well, their shareholders anyway.)

It’s natural.  It’s normal.  It’s above all understandable.  But I don’t necessarily like it very much.  And I’m not even getting into the whole spying thing or the ad placements thing, or the personalised results or anything like that. (Yet.)

I can’t help it.  I just don’t like and trust Google anywhere near as much as I once did.