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I'm sitting here with the phone headset on, listening to the music loop on some company's paid tech support line, on which, half an hour ago, a recording told me the current wait time was less than two minutes.
After running up a new high score at Snood , I started reading blogs, soaking up the fearsome stuff that Jason, Martin, Evelyn and Dave seem to be seeing in Google's expanded advertising programs, its new patent, its acquisition of Pyra and its silence about strategies behind all those moves.
I still think we're seeing too much tea in too few leaves.
Jason:
With their acquisition of Pyra and new Content-Targeted Advertising offering, it should be apparent that Google is not a search company. What they are exactly is unclear, but their biggest asset is: a highly annotated map of the web.
Is the New Yorker's editorial quality diminished by its advertising? How about the San Jose Mercury-News? Or Linux Journal? Speaking as a writer for LJ, I can tell you that I write with no conciousness whatsoever of who is advertising in the magazine, or for what.
In fact there is nothing in either Google's purchase of Pyra or its advertising plans that says anything about company's search methodologies or results, or about any intentions to become a nonsearch company. There is also no evidence that they intend to alter their search results to suit advertisers, or to do anything other than deliver better results for each search.
Quite the contrary, in fact. Note that they run text ads (which are unobtrusive and load fast) where they don't get in the way, even on Blogspot blogs, where they're inside banners that have been there all along. I've never seen less obtrusive, or more potentially useful, advertising anywhere this side of classifieds, which are the only form of advertising (with the qualified exception of yellow pages) that readers actually demand.
Which is the holy grail here, by the way.
On the whole, advertising subtracts value. Outside of classifieds (which are among the most highly-read parts of newspapers), there is no form of advertising we would pay for. In fact, we'll pay (HBO, TiVo, public broadcasting) not to get advertising.
Google seems to be exploring the question of whether or not there can ever be a demand market for advertising. So far the answer is still no. But as far as I know,Google is the only company that is deeply exploring the possibilities, and I want to give them props for that.
Evelyn makes an interesting point here:
Now if Google Inc., plays with the relevance of the free listings, and makes the paid listings to appear more relevant than the free listings, Google will lose the majority of its free-search customers. To ensure that there is a constant stream of people to see the paid listings, Google needs to ensure the relevance of its free-listings. The tension is therefore on between ensuring that free listings are relevant to an information seeker, as against the relevance of the paid advertising. By nature, the advertisements are likely to be not as relevant but close enough for potential customers to click on the paid advertising rather than, or as well as, the free-listings.
First, the free search results don't have customers. They have users, who happen to pay nothing for the results. Which means Google has one reason to make the advertising more relevant than plain search: there's money in it. A very interesting point. But let's be real here: would Google be stupid enough to let advertisers compromise search results? It would be suicide. The risks so far outweigh the costs.
Second, paid listings are not "search results," but paid advertising that's published alongside actual search results. The two are not, in any way, parallel and equivalent forms of search. "Paid listings" here is a very misleading label for what you get when you look for something at Google.
Dave says,
Put it all together, and Google has changed. Kottke is right, it is no longer a search engine. He gets one thing wrong, there is nothing more they can do to improve the search engine with Blogger content, unless they ignore changes.xml from weblogs.com, but I bet that's exactly what they're doing. I suppose it's not immoral, but get this -- it's not web-like.
He's right about that last point