Google’s Bad Hair Week
Someone seems to have misplaced the mousse over in Mountain View and the wind hasn’t been blowing Google’s way this week. In the average week Google generally makes at least one, often more, announcements that are newsworthy. But this week, not only have the announcements been thin, most stories about the search giant involved things going wrong.
First there was a more than thirteen hour blackout of Google’s social networking site Orkut. While few in the States may have noticed, rumor has it panic and confusion reigned on the streets of Brazil.
The message on the site claimed that it was “under construction” which might imply that some new features were on the way, but not only is thirteen hours way too long for a feature upgrade, we’ve yet to see an announcement from Google explaining the downtime.
Next on Google’s oops list came the revelation that some user accounts in the massively popular GMail service had lost all their email. Google representatives emailed TechCrunch to say:
Regretfully, a small number of our users ??? around 60 ??? lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th.
Then there was the case of the disappearing sex blogs which BoingBoing covered throughout the week. It seems that a number of sex blogs experienced an overnight dropped in their Google rankings or disapeared from the search results altogether. And mind you these are not porn splogs, but informational blogs like Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles (note the landing page is okay but the rest of the site is decidedly NSFW).
No one seems to know exactly what happened to the sex blogs, though Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has a thorough analysis of what could have gone wrong. Whatever the cause, it was more bad news for Google.
Outside of soft/hardware failings, Google also took something of a beating in the blogosphere for their annual Zeitgeist, a list of the most popular search terms this year.
Many readers were suspicious that the otherwise unpopular social networking site Bebo was the number one search term of 2006 according to Google. In Google’s defense it’s worth noting that Google Zeitgeist tracks the biggest “movers” in search — the search terms that went from nothing to a lot over a period of time.
In other words, Bebo had the biggest amount of growth in 2006, measured in raw percentage, over 2005’s numbers, which explains why it’s number 1 — not because it’s the most-searched term on Google.
But fine print as never been the blogosphere’s strong suit and the outcry was such the Google posted a clarification expounding the criteria behind the Zeitgeist.
The Zeitgeist controversy may be made of misunderstanding and hot blooded bloggers, but Blake Ross, wunderkind of Firefox fame, had a more serious bone to pick with Google. Ross says that Google’s new self promotional tactics are eroding the public trust.
Earlier this week Google searches with terms like “blog,” “photo album” and “speadsheet” began displaying “tips” which suggest Google’s own services in those fields. Ross accuses Google of abusing its powerful position to promote the company’s own products.
Of course Yahoo! and other search engines already do something similar, but many have always held Google to slightly higher standard and the new self promotional efforts seem, well, heavy handed.
For instance I frequently search for old Monkey Bites posts using the site: operator with the full Monkey Bites url. Because that url contains the term “blog,” Google now adds a “tip” at the top of the page suggesting I try Blogger “to share your life online with a blog.” What’s irritating is that the term isn’t even part of my search, the site: operator is simply restricting my search parameters.
Even a WWII era punch card machine could probably figure out I’m not looking for a blogging service.
Perhaps the most irritating thing is that Google tries to pass these off as “tips.” These aren’t tips, they’re advertisements and calling them tips is misleading and, well, almost evil.
What ever happened to don’t be evil? It was so simple.
At best Google’s new self promotional drive is simply annoying and irrelevant, at worst Ross is right and users may lose confidence in the objectivity of Google’s search results.
On the brighter side of an otherwise dismal week perhaps Google can take comfort in the notion that things go wrong at Google seldom enough that when they do, like Jennifer Aniston’s bad hair days, they make the news. Paul Mitchell was unreachable for comment.
