You’ve probably seen the news about Viacoms lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infingement. Well, everyone new that was coming and it will be a test case that will be very interesting.
But I really do have some doubts about Google… If you know anything about the internet and search engines, you know that Google is the major player and has been for a while. However, whereas just a couple of short years ago Google was a free service, just like YouTube, Google has now morpehd into a multi, multi billion dollar advertising system with a front-end that still appears to be free search engine results.
The truth is far different from that though, as far as I can see…
Monsters Spawned
Adwords; Pay Per Click is the first child, Son Of Google. It generates billions of dollars in advertising revenue for G by allowing people to bid on keywords.
Adsense; the Ugly Sister. Allows me or you to show advertisers Adwords adds contextually on our web pages and share in the profits with G.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think these are great ideas. But both have become monsters in their own right. It seems that G is unable stop spamming and its attempts to do so invariably hurt real businesses when they get dropped from the SERPS or are forced to bid high on keywords because of low quality scores.
Google is all about relevence, at least that’s what they claim. Yet they will be the first to admit that their SERPS quality is pretty bad a lot of the time. And, of course its a SPAM issue. Well, now SPAM comes in 3 flavours. SEO, PPC and Adsense. What’s your favorite?
So Google is in a constant mode of trying to control all its spam flavors, while making billions of dollars. There’s a saying that goes something like ‘If you need to control something then its out of control’…
I wonder if we could get some sort of recompense from Google whenever spam shows up in their SERPS or Adwords or Adsense related to our keywords. You know what its like when you see your website listed amongst a load of crud and spammy pages… Well, if Viacoms lawsuit is successful that’s going to be just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure some clever lawyer out in California will come up with a class action lawsuit.
And getting back to that lawsuit. I think its very strange that holier than though G can decide its OK for people to share copyrighted material online, but you can’t put up a web page that requires someones email address without paying, in some cases, outrageous financial penalties to G.
No comments yet.