Google penalised many sites for selling paid text links in October 2007. Their belief was that such text links interfered with their search engine, but it is possible that they had other motives (see AdSense, one of their main sources of income). The decision to penalise these sites was still extraordinary; if Google could detect these links, could Google not just have ignored these links?

Google claimed paid text links damaged the reliability of results to the searcher, and it is easily argued that they do. What Google fail to realise is through making an example of websites, they are making their results less useful.

Is it not ridiculous that in a search for ‘Text Link Ads’, the first result is not the very popular site of the same name but instead a post about Google penalising the site? TLA in fact only appear on the fifth page of results; which is stupid when I expect many users searching for ‘Text Link Ads’ will be primarily looking for that site.

Another example is Everyclick, the search engine which raises money for charity. A search for Everyclick fails to bring the search engine up until the seventh page. Even on the sevent, the result is not to their homepage. As it so happens, my review of Everyclick is actually on the second page.

That is what is completely stupid; reviews of the website, and press releases involving it, rank higher than the website itself. Is that good for the user? No. It’s not just me who finds this a bit odd; Will Critchlow did an entire post on the matter last year.

Will speculated that ‘the main problem is that they are being penalised by Google at the moment for duplicate content problems. They have gone out… got mentioned on a load of powerful charity domains. The problem from Google’s point of view is that these pages look very much like… lightly rehashed press release content’. So Google penalised a useful site on the sole basis of the type of marketing they utilised.

Google must stop penalising advertising. They must stop penalising both the advertiser and publisher. If Google wants to ‘beat’ such forms of advertising, the way in which to do it is not to destroy their index but to simply teach their bots to ignore such advertisements.

POPTUB is a channel on YouTube which produces which produces a daily show of hot videos, produces interviews and goes behind the scenes on many other productions. POPTUB is professionally produced, sponsored by Pepsi. I personally don’t see the attraction of POPTUB, but I find it interesting that old media are so keen on them.

Highlighting popular videos isn’t even that new of an idea. Forums and several vodcasts, like Best of YouTube and Internet Superstar, have been that great an idea. So what makes POPTUB so different and so popular with YouTube superstars like HotforWords, Obama Girl and Nalts? Frankly, I do not know. HotforWords even covered them on her show, and claimed that it was not a ‘paid advertisement’. The majority of her viewers did not find POPTUB as interesting as HotforWords did, obviously, as they only gave the video a rating of 2.5/5.

Old media clearly like POPTUB too. How many other YouTube channels could get behind the scenes with Fall Out Boy or the cast of High School Musical? According to Cnet, ‘Poptub has promised advertisers 3 million views of Poptub by the end of the year’. Perhaps overly ambitious aims like that are the reason why!

YouTube viewers don’t seem to be too eager to watch POPTUB. Out of their 149 videos, the most popular is an interview with HotforWords which attracted 214,000 views (but only a 2.5 rating), followed by three with 40,000-60,000 views. The rest have less than 20,000 views; the majority have less than 10,000.

Thousands of views may seem impressive, but considering the amount of hype POPTUB has gathered, high profile interviewees and a presumably professional production, that’s quite low. That’s actually very low when one considers the world’s most annoying 6 year old can gain 800,000 views in less than three days!

Apparently, Google are responsible for POPTUB.

I wonder what’s going on with POPTUB, and how they get high profile members of the YouTube community to support them. It strikes me that POPTUB does not understand what the YouTube community wants, which would be extremely bad if Google were reponsible for it, as that would mean they do not even know their own userbase. For example, POPTUB clearly misjudged the viewers of shows like HotforWords, who clearly didn’t appreciate their show simply plugging another.

POPTUB, despite its backing, will fail. Why? YouTube users don’t like it. I’d dare say they prefer amateur shows and they dislike TNCs producing shows, and would rather watch the likes of Revision3.

‘Google controls the Internet’ might sound paranoid, but they do. Whilst they don’t exactly have editorial control over websites, they can force websites into entirely changing their revenue model.

A large percentage of my income used to be generated from text link ads, but I can no longer generate money in this way. Why, you ask? Google saw it fit to reduce the PageRank of this blog as a penalty, which meant I no longer got the visitors and the status to sell these adverts.

Google claims it made their search engine less usable, and whilst this may be true to a degree, they have made the whole internet become less usable as webmasters must now turn to more intrusive traditional adverts, such as advertising banners or interstitials.

I have another reason, besides usability, why Google may have seen it fit to ban text links. As text links became increasingly popular, more webmasters turned their backs on intrusive, and not as profitable, Google AdSense advertisements. This will have naturally reduced Google’s profit. Perhaps Google realised the only way to get people back on AdSense was through penalising text links, from which they don’t profit.

So, I turn away from text links. What do Google do? They stop the advertising programme which was most profitable for me, Google Referrals, and don’t let me join their new affiliate programme. I used to use ‘Firefox with Google’ advertisements, but Google are obviously now unwilling to foot the bill for Firefox users, especially following the release of Chrome. I doubt I can even make $100/month from AdSense now.

Thanks to Google, advertising online is becoming harder and harder. If advertising is harder to obtain, there’ll be less content as webmasters/bloggers will have less motivation to create content.

I understand Google wants to maintain the quality of their search engine, but I do wonder if there’s a line to draw regarding where Google’s influence should stop. Whilst I realise I don’t have to comply with Google’s ToS, in reality I do or I’d lose the vast majority of my visitors.

Perhaps it’s time for a serious competitor to Google. All giants fall, eventually.

This post is from David Peralty, a Canadian problogger, who writes at xFEP, another Grand Effect blog.

Recently, there was a big deal made about how far we have come in search online. It seems some people think we have come 90% of the way to a perfect search system, probably meaning Google, and others say that we’ve probably only gotten 10% of the way to a perfect search engine.

This makes me wonder if we need a new search engine to come along, or just new innovations from the ones we already have. A long time ago, a fair number of geeks were using Alta Vista, a search engine that was fairly well known, but not really Yahoo! like in strength. Many people swore by its results and were happy, at least until a little search engine called Google started picking up steam. Now Alta Vista is, for most, just a distant memory, and Google seems to be the new goliath of search. But with Google’s business interests more focused on advertising, are their results getting more and more watered down, and gamed by people trying to make a quick buck?

There are new search engines popping up all the time, trying to either capture a certain niche, or attempting in some way to outdo Google, but is the new search engine that provides us the exact results we want already out there? Could Google, Yahoo or Microsoft do something revolutionary to enhance search that would make it the only system worth using?

Really, the importance of this whole conversation has a lot to do with the ever increasing archives of content stored online, and our growing need to be able to sift through information to find what we are looking for, and as school starts up again, and College students run to College Crunch or the ever important Wikipedia for help, I am left wondering if online search will ever be perfected.

What kind of results are you getting from search engines? Do you use any search engines outside of the big three? Let me know in the comments below.

Google is often seen as the perfect business but they too have several products which, quite simply, have failed.

Firstly, there is Google Answers which Google shut in 2006. Google Answers was a paid question and answer service. It was much more professional and reliable than a site such as Yahoo! Answers but I guess the old ‘why pay when you can get it for free?’ ethos worked against Google!

Another thing, which in my eyes, is a failure is Orkut. Orkut is a social networking site made by a Google employee and owned by Google. Whilst Orkut is apparently very successful in Brazil and India, I expect most people in the developed world have ever even heard of it. The reason I say this is a failure is because it failed in its original target market (the US). On the other hand, Orkut does have 120,000,000 users!

Another, arguable, failure is Google Video. Google acquired YouTube and quite rightly decided to use YouTube’s brand but this was at the expense of Google Video. Google Video also revoked the DRM on purchased videos, such as Star Trek, last year meaning even if you bought them, you couldn’t play them. This service simply wasn’t popular!

That’s all I can think of!