New Search

On April 1st we noted the Guardian April Fools joke (that people put on Guardian Goggles to not see things/opinions they don't like) wasn't a joke. People bias their views without needing Guardian Goggles to do it for them. Since writing that, a paper published in Science Daily on March 27 (a few short days before April Fools day) came into Broadstuff Towers, explaining that old Sociological thesis of happy Homophily is bunk. Essentially:

The prevailing sociological theory, known as homophily, is that like seeks like. Those who have similar opinions tend to aggregate together and reinforce opinions that grow more divergent from the center over time. This is the echo chamber model that would seem to gain validation in the era of talk radio, cable news and the Internet. According to this theory, we are polarized precisely because we have greater ability to choose our social networks and news sources. We narrowly tailor our information sources by selecting them based on how closely they mirror our own tastes.

The paper piints out that mathematical models that try to use homophily to explain polarization have come up short as most are based on something known as De Groot's model, which assumes that people form opinions in a way that minimizes overall disagreement within their network of friends and relations. In theory, an individual's opinion gradually converges to an average of those in his or her network. The flaw in these models is that they predict that opinions in society as a whole can only become more uniform over time, resulting in depolarization rather than polarization. Which clearly is not the case. What does explain things better is Biased Assimilation:

In biased assimilation people more easily accept evidence that supports their opinion and, likewise, are prone to discredit evidence that does not fit. More specifically, people look at inconclusive evidence in a way that is most favorable to their existing point of view.

"It seems counter-intuitive that two individuals would arrive at a more divergent opinion when presented with identical information that is inconclusive, but that's what happens," said David Lee, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and a co-author of the paper. "You might think that seeing identical evidence would produce greater moderation and agreement, but it doesn't."

The team has studied biased assimilation to help create Internet-based social systems that counteract polarization by what they describe as "surprising validators" -- counterbalanced evidence that is presented by otherwise well-known and trusted sources. Imagine Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow taking an unexpected stance. If you were aligned with one or the other, you might be more inclined to listen to the evidence if presented by the source most similar to you on other issues.

Apperently the research is being done to create better recommendation engines and online collaboration tools to help people find common ground on difficult and divisive societal issues, the front-runner approach seems to be systems that show how little difference there is between X and Y, rather than just highlight differences. An interesting fact is worth noting was, when looking at current recommendation systems:

"The system that recommends the most relevant item to a user turns out to be always polarizing. The other two systems, which chose a random item liked by the user and recommends an item most similar to it, were polarizing only if the user was biased to begin with. It was surprising to find that biased assimilation provides a useful framework to analyze the polarizing effects of recommender systems.

So, maybe Guardian Goggles would be better off laying out their Right-On texts alongside the most hateful Torygraph equivalent, and emphasizing the similarities instead, for all died-in-the-wool liberalistas to get the warm and fuzzies from maximium hand-wringing

I wrote about the Summly acquisition by Yahoo yesterday, and wanted to catch up on where it had got to today. Now, there are essentially 2 stories about Summly:

1. Yay! The made-for-media one: Smart 17 year old forms company in bedroom, 18 months later sells smart app to Yahoo for $30m

2. WTF? - Yahoo spends $30m to buy pre-revenue company funded by many famous and influential people to buy what is essentially unpatentable, common and possibly largely someone else's software, and closes it down - why?

If you search Google, you get 7 pages of Story 1 in various guises, only on page 8 is the first questioning article shown. If you search Twitter, within 7 or 8 tweets you get a far more nuanced view - it reflects the puff pieces Google has, but also views on what Summly actually is, it's background, why Yahoo may have done the deal etc etc - the sort of stuff investigative journalists once did.

I think its a very interesting comparison between social curation and what is essentially now a "popularity" algorithm. Google's algorithm essentially treats quantity of links as a proxy for quality, whereas increasingly the link quantity is actually a measure of common popularity, not the same thing at all. Read Google, and you'd barely know anything about Summly because the first 7 pages comprise of press regurgitation and it has utterly failed at telling you anything useful about it. To summarise Google, you would think the story is:

Nick D’Aloisio is young. He started the company when he was 15. Did I mention he’s young? And he started a company. And he was only 15!

Now he’s a millionaire, and he’s only 17! Can you believe that? A tech millionaire! He’s only 17! And he must be smart. After all, he started the company when he was only 15. Young, smart, and now rich! What will his girlfriend think? (Really. Shameful.)

All we know about Summly itself is that it summarized web articles into three bullet points that occasionally made sense. And I only know that because I tried it while D’Aloisio was barraging me with manipulative, fake-“URGENT” emails much like these in late 2011. The summaries weren’t good enough for me to try more than a few times. But the press never talked about the actual product in their vapid articles about Nick D’Aloisio’s youth.

(Hat Tip to Marco.com for that).

But search Twitter, and you get a totally different story. Twitter, despite a reputation for being celebrity and inanity obsessed, is in fact - on the basis of my search anyway, far less so than Google. What is certain is that Twitter gave me a far fuller picture, within the first page I got, and, in this case anyway was the better search engine by far.

Also, an interesting thought to ponder is where exactly the accurate measure of the sentiment and influence lies. Reading Google, you would think its a "Yay, Boy Done Good" world out there, and the Yahoo PR department has Done Good and deserves a slap on the back and a good raise. Reading Twitter, however, you get a totally different picture and you can see a far higher high proportion think Yahoo has not been the sharpest knife in the block, and qute a few people qurestioning what Summly actually had to offer. Totally different to Google. And which is more influential? Google records 2.24 million searches on Summly, Twitter is still turning over like a Geiger counter 36 hours later, if you average that at say a Twt every 2 seconds (say 30 per minute) and assume the average Twitterer has 50 users that's c 3.5 million people reached in that time. And the sentiment split on Twitter is very different, its still running at about 50:50 "Yay" vs. "WTF?". So according to Twitter, the Yahoo PR Dept shouldn't be reaching for the Champagne just yet. (Actually, reading the comments to the "Yay" pieces in the Mainstream media gives you a more balanced view too)

But if I were hazarding an educated guess, I'd say that the Twitter audience were likely to be more influential, and probably a more accurate measure of overall sentiment out there. Which, going forward, makes the question of who has the better Search engine very, very interesting. Because that drives the Ad revenue.

Update - was mulling this overnight, another factor is probably the amount of Search Engine "Optimisation" that Google suffers from, ie the entire industry dedicated to spamming Google search barey exists on Twitter today, the most we see so far (apart from teh pretty girl/link to url scammers) is "enthusiastic supporters" of various posters/topics/etc muddying the twittersteam sentiment with endless retweets apporobations etc of their hero (or endless knockdowns if they are opposed). No dount if Twitter became the default search mode this industry would go into overdrive on Twitter too.

I had written quite a long post on Facebook Graph Search and managed to accidentally delete it before saving. Frustrating, but in restrospect I realised my whole post boiled down to this summary:

1. It searches your social graph and their likes to get a (hopefully) more relevant set of results than Google's "Whole World Wide Web" link heirarchy does (good summary here on Search Engine land)

2. Despite the predictable hype*, there is less to it than meets the eye at the moment, as it relies on a limited data set, ie your social graph and their "like" activity objects that they have defined.

3. But that is a limited set, so to get more viable than being a cool tool on the search bar (ie to be useful to paying advertisers, not users), it has to:

- Increase the size of the social graph it polls for you - never mind your friends, it wants all your friends' acquaintances, all your local service providers, and anywhere you've ever been, recorded on your graph.
- Increase the amount of data that you record, that it it wants you to record, for advertising purposes. So none of Auntie Millies kids' photos - you need to record things advertisers like to know, ie what do you consume

When that happens, things like this will be serious issues

4. It has to do this because it is desperate to find a Pay-Per-Click-for-Intentions advertising game plan.

5. Many of its users may not want to do this, either open their graph to randoms they don't know or collect data that they don't want to.

Now to be sure, the Google method is showing its age, what with continual SEO activity subverting its link values, and popular culture ensuring that the most popular link is seldom best, most valuable or even correct (see Gresham's Law of Bad Information Driving out Good), and using likes instead of links is clever - but is this going to be any better?

Not really, or to be more accurate, not as yet.

To use the tired old use case that hucksters of new technology for the last 20 years always come up with, i.e. finding a great restaurant in a new town like, oh, say San Francisco, and to outperform Google (or just any old recommendation website), it has to go far farther than my own social graph (as only a few people on my own graph live there in SF), to pick up people who don't know me, but who do live in SF. It also has to have these people record the great restaurants they all like in SF, as well as tell FB lots about themselves so it can persuade me that a search via those people is more relevant than me doing a quick Google or TimeOut or Zagat or whatever. And that means opening up people's data to people they may not want to open up to, and also getting them to collect data they may not want/be arsed to do.

And that is a very big ask.....(In fact the relatively low takeup of Foursquare et al suggests few will willingly volunter lots of location data - cue breaking open the Smartphone location sensor data...)

(Update - I see Slate has said some roughly similar sceptical things)

(Update 2 - ditto over here)

*Not just the standard Tech Hype Pack, many IPO investors are desperate for a way to surface from being underwater too!

On January 2nd we wrote a post on "The Increasing Uselessness of Google Search" based on our experience on searching for commercial items over the holiday period. Matt Cutts of Google told us (and others who had noticed the same) that we'd never had its so good with Spam and later that month on TWIG a number of A Lister US Tech luminaries told us we didn't know what we were talking about. Roll forward to the 24 February, and Google announces the most brutal change to its search algorithm ever - Search Engine Land:

New Change Impacts 12% Of US Results

The new algorithm — Google’s “recipe” for how to rank web pages — starting going live yesterday, the company told me in an interview today.

Google changes its algorithm on a regular basis, but most changes are so subtle that few notice. This is different. Google says the change impacts 12% (11.8% is the unrounded figure) of its search results in the US , a far higher impact on results than most of its algorithm changes. The change only impacts results in the US. It may be rolled out worldwide in the future.

..........

Officially, Google isn’t saying the algorithm change is targeting content farms. The company specifically declined to confirm that, when I asked. However, Matt Cutts — who heads Google’s spam fighting team — told me, “I think people will get the idea of the types of sites we’re talking about.”

What can we say except Told Ya So

Actually, I do give Google a lot of credit for moving so far, so fast, and Matt Cutts did what he had to as a Corporate Droid - but it really is so frigging transparent, why no just 'fess up guys?. Anyway, Kudos! As for those A Listers, we know who you are....... and we're saying nowt more 'cos we know we'll mess up one day as well

There are some who suggest this is PR as much as real action - which may well be true, but I think Google now really understands it let things rot a bit too far......

Ryan Spoon wrote something I've been increasinglty thinking for a week or so about the New Techmeme, and it's pointing to Twitter and Quora:

Techmeme has been making an increased effort to move beyond blog posts by integrating Twitter and Quora conversations. Conceptually it is attractive, but figuring out how to cohesively merge the different conversation types is quite difficult.

Techmeme will test their way into the right solution… and I give them credit for integrating Twitter beyond a side-bar widget (most attempts)… but I am not sure examples like this add value to the experience (other than getting to headlines very quickly):
He goes on to show a conversation on the board that was a bit circular and unhelpful (the inevitable impact of pointing to a microblog and an aggregator if one is not carefu)l. Curiously enough, he then looks at yesterday's gerfuffle with various Uber-reaching Twitterclients, and felt they they had kinda got it right...

And as it broke on Friday, there was a mixture of real-time commentary, news and updates from the companies themselves (namely Twitter / @Support and Bill Gross).

Whether in real-time or as a digest, Techmeme was the best way to follow. Why? Because Techmeme had figured out how to appropriately (and immediately) combine the different news sources and formats… most of which was blurred between news and tweets.

...which was interesting because just before I read his article I was putting pen to paper to observe similar frustrations to him, but I was writing about the frustration of navigating around the news item he felt was "getting it right". Having compared the two experiences I think I know why - when he was writing it was a breaking item on a sidebar (see below)



Great, pithy early warnings. However, by the time I woke up in the UK, it had mutated to this:




That's Techmeme the same as it's ever been, I hear you say.....amd on the surface, you are right - but now click on "expand discussion" on that big story from TechCrunch....this is about 1/4 of the expansion ( I have highlighted the twitter input in yellow, its nigh on half the input - btw I missed one, fourth from bottom):





The issues I had were the following, from a user experience point of view - firstly, Twitter:

(i) There is a hell of a lot more stuff there now to wade through, and that real estate is precious - I want to read the blogs I like and trust, and scanning through the longer twts (some of which look like txt speak) is more jarring than blog post headings in my opinion

(ii) Personally, I don't find the twts high value, as they all tend to say roughly the same thing, which typically I've already seen on Twitter or wherever - there are only so many ways you can say "ZOMFG Twitter kicked off UberTwitter go here [link]." in 140 characters, and there is precious little analysis in a twt after you've read 2 or 3

Secondly, Quora - I am not sure of the wisdom of an Aggregator linking to another Aggregator, because - in my experience anyway:

(i) You sort of just get the same news review you have just read on Techmeme again (especially as many of the Quora participants have typically made a Twitter post that has already been picked up on Techmeme), and then you have to go scanning the Quora page to see something new and its just sloppy seconds of the same stuff (in this case anyway, maybe other discussions are better).

(ii) I prefer different aggregators for news - Hacker News, Slashdot for example - to me Quora is just FriendFeed 2.0 - same people (who are everywhere anyway), same conversations, and with the interconnected twts and often blog posts from the same people all linking to their other posts in different media it all became a bit like a "mini link farm" around this story in my opinion (I should draw the lines between the items that are interlinked on the above page)

But to take Ryan's point, clearly there is a need to bring the real time into Techmeme - my take on it is this:

(i) Twitter feed is useful when Ryan saw it - on the sidebar as an early warning. less so when I saw it later, spamming the picture. IMO Twitter's value is speed, not content. I wonder if there is some way of killing tweets after they have been on a while, or showing them as a separate grouping / having a "show no tweets" filter option?

(ii) Quora is both easier - I can ignore it - and harder: I really question the use of another aggregator as a major news source, because the screen real estate and my attention are the limited resources. I would probably prefer to see it as a another link to the main story in the commentary section (like Slashdot sometimes is) rather than a destination in its own right.

But it is an interesting UI/UX question, and like Ryan, I think if anyone can get it right its the Techmeme team, but the fundamental value Techmeme has had to me is that it reduces, not increases the stuff I have to wade through...until now. . I shall watch with interest.

Normally when we predict things will happen its over months or years, not weeks - so when we predicted the inevitabiity of search spam filters early this year and also noted the things Google should to to get themselves back on track we noted that they should, as a matter of Class A Fundamentals:

Fundamentals - secure the next 3 years

1. Get the core search back to the quality it was a few years ago - this is the golden goose, the bread and butter, etc etc - if this drops away then everything else is moot. Sorry, Matt Cutts, if you believe your algorithms tell you it is better than ever before, then your algorithms are wrong. If I were looking to make Google search social, a good start would be letting people sharing spam-site killing data for filters. Crap search = fewer users, fewer users = fewer Ads seen, fewer Ads = less revenues, less revenues = misery.

2. Stop f*cking around with people's privacy. In the Silicon Valley bubble, privacy may be over - but to a lot of other people out there (and their governments) it isn't. To reduce the risk of being seen as creepy, evil guys that governments want to take a very close look at, rein in the this tendency. People can walk away very fast now decent competition is emerging (see above Ads - to - Misery tale), and grumpy Governments can tie up a lot of time, cost and ultimately market access.

Those are the big things, the "A" class "Must Do's".

3 weeks later and Lo, they announce the exact idea I highlighted above:

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

Kudos, though it is also more evidence that the will to act on spam has only really been there since a fairly strong user driven backlash since the New Year's superspamming of search results.

First thing to cull - Demand Media, and as we noted, HuffPo had to sell, we think they saw this coming. I hope we can also share our culls with friends, sort of like an Akismet Almanac

Personally I'm going to wait for Mozilla to do theirs because I don't like toolbars/apps that phone home to public corporations who are already playing fast and loose with user data. But net-net, this is a first move in a trend is going to create a major balance of power shift in the SEO spameconomy, because now:

(i) Users will be able to cull sites they know are cr*p, rather than waitfor Google et al to (not) act..

(ii) Those sites won't know if they are being culled or not for quite a while, so they are going to spend a lot of money being useless, poor things.

Cue arms race in frequency-hopping URLS.....

Now, lets see some movement on Item 2......

It's interesting - ever since we wrote about the "Increasing Uselessness of Google Search" after the 2010 Christmas holidays, it looks like a whole lot of Googleflaws are coming out. Today there is a report in the NYT of how JC Penney gamed them over several months in the holiday period. Essentially JC got some black-hat SEO guys to build a link-farm to boost their rankings across a whole lot of consumer product terms, and Google didn't spot it.

There are links to JC Penney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on. Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie ever: “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.” When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.

The thing is, these things are not new - anybody in the whole 'Net space knew about all this 5 years ago at least, those in Search knew about it for even longer. So the question you have to ask yourself is "how come it takes such a bright company like Google so long to not solve this problem?" . The Google Hypothesis is that this is all very hard, and there is a continual war with SEO guys, and the War On Spam is a long term slog, and besides their metrics tell them there is less spam and better results than ever.

I think they are being somewhat disingenuous, or (more scarily) their metrics are plain wrong as they don't understand what "spam" really is. It's not that all of Google is corrupted, but our experience is that typically anything of mass market consumer value is gamed to the nines - and it's not as if one has to put any deep study in, its visible to the naked eye, as it were. It is blatantly obvious what is being gamed, and how it is being gamed, and has been for several years, and I for one cannot believe that it is not possible to develop approached to solve this for the 5% of the Googleverse that is taking 95% of this spam if one had the will (I believe they have the know-how). Non trivial, sure - but do-able, even if it requires human intelligence - especially over 5 years.

So we have to look for the "why" there was not been the will - one option is that they have been so busy with all the other projects that the eye has been taken off the ball. Possible, and I suspect that's what they will tell us in about 3 months or so when more comes out the Googlewoodwork (There will be more, I am sure....). Another hypothesis is that Google, by a combination of intellectual comfort (no Search challengers till recently) and reliance on Big Algorithms, wasn't able to see/ build effective defences. But heck, competitors and decent New Search techniques have been around for the last 2 years now.

But here’s another hypothesis, that also explains all the facts and complexities, the almost unchallenged arrival of mass Content Farm businesses, and win's the Patrick's Razor award - we will let the NYT run with it:

Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

The hypothesis that Google is colluding in all this as eventually a lot of the Ad money flows to them is clearly a heinous suggestion - but it does explain things rather well......


*Patrick's Razor - when it comes to money, the most cynical explanation is usually right

Just after Christmas we wrote a post on the "Increasing Uselessness of Google search" which (if we may say so ourselves) helped kick off a furore which still continues, the latest episode this week being a debate between Google, Bing and newcomer Blekko - over to Vivek Wahwa, who emceed' it:

I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion this week between Google, Microsoft, and Blekko. The event, which I emceed, was called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, and was organized by BigThink and Microsoft. As I joked, it seemed odd that Google was playing the role of “evil” monopolist; Microsoft, the “good” contender, whilst Blekko was a fly on the wall.

........

At the conference, I gave my spiel on my vision of search: how I want my computer to serve me and tell me what I want to know, rather than my having to cater to its whims by entering specific keywords in a text box and reading through text links—which are often baited by spammers. I challenged Matt to tell everyone what Google was doing about the spam. Matt, instead, went on the warpath and accused Bing of stealing Google’s information. He disclosed a sting operation that his team had run. He expressed outrage at Microsoft’s ethics. Harry Shum fired back, defended Bing, and accused Google of playing games.

Cue media frenzy - but when Vivek says that Google has "changed the argument" away from spammy search and how Google's money is made, I think he is wrong - at least outside the Valley where maybe more bloggers are in the Googleshadow - here in the Uk it seems to be seen quite clearly. Here is the Torygraph:

Google’s Search Fellow Amit Singhal complained via Twitter that Bing was copying Google’s results. That should tell you everything you need to know about the scale of this dispute: serious accusations of theft of intellectual property, even in Silicon Valley, are made in court.

Here is e-Consultancy:

First, Bing isn't copying Google's results. It's not looking at Google's results for particular searches and then changing the order of its own results to reflect these. This really would be "stealing" Google's results. Instead, Bing is using, as one of the signals to decide the order of its own results, which URLs people click on when they search for things on Google. If anything, Bing is in our search result pages stealing our click through data.

Puremango:

When Google set up their experiment, they created special pages on their site which contained words which didn’t exist anywhere else on the web, then they installed Bing toolbar and clicked on links from those ‘synthetic’ pages. Bing toolbar sent MS that data, just like it would for any page, and their system incorporated that clickstream data into the other signals just as normal.

But what that meant was that when Google then went to Bing and searched for those unique words, all the other signals didn’t have any input at all; the only data Bing had was from their clickstream signal, and so that was what the system used. It’s not surprising that Bing returned the same pages as Google did, because that was all the data that existed in the whole world about that query! Bing didn’t collect that data because it was from Google, Bing collected it because it was from Bing toolbar users.

Slashdot wasn't fooled either, as this exchange early on in the comments shows:

"Apparently Google's accusations are viewed by some as a backhanded compliment."

........

I don't thing they're wrong. I remember years and years ago how excited the Slashdot crowd got when Microsoft started directly addressing their superiority over Linux in their marketing propaganda. It meant Linux was enough of a threat that Microsoft was taking it seriously.

When was the last time you heard Google talk about other search engines? When it comes to searching, Google's been the undisputed market leader for a long time. For them to seriously acknowledge Bing, even if it's solely in the form of criticism, is still a big step.

.......

I still don't understand how this is in any way dodgey or underhanded.

1. Step 1: User opts in to report anonymous clickthrough data to Bing
2. Step 2: User searches for a term, chooses a search result
3. Step 3: Microsoft gets the data and compares it against relevent information for that search term.

Since google chose a random, unique for their search term, there is nothing to compare the user behavior with so it receives a disproportionately high amount of weight. With actual search terms, what a user searches for on google will have significantly less weight in the rankings, and depending on their algorithm could be next to inconsequential.

But the fact remains that looking at how customers use the competition (especially the frontrunner) is prevalent in all industries, and is a really smart idea from a business standpoint, and only serves to benefit your customers. By the looks of Google's optional photo homepage, they are guilty of it too (and if they weren't doing more I would be shocked). It seems the only people who are upset about this are Google, and people loyal to Google (most /. users).

Conclusion - This is a Googleblink!

(Update - Kara Swisher reckons it's got Larry Page written all over it - a blink indeed)

Lots of stuff on the webz about what Google (i.e. Larry Page) should do to get Google's mojo back - much of it mutually contradictory of course, or requiring too many things at once. From a strategic perspective however, the oldies are still goodies - Fundamentals, Focus and Future, via the simple action of following the money:

Fundamentals - secure the next 3 years

1. Get the core search back to the quality it was a few years ago - this is the golden goose, the bread and butter, etc etc - if this drops away then everything else is moot. Sorry, Matt Cutts, if you believe your algorithms tell you it is better than ever before, then your algorithms are wrong. If I were looking to make Google search social, a good start would be letting people sharing spam-site killing data for filters. Crap search = fewer users, fewer users = fewer Ads seen, fewer Ads = less revenues, less revenues = misery.

2. Stop f*cking around with people's privacy. In the Silicon Valley bubble, privacy may be over - but to a lot of other people out there (and their governments) it isn't. To reduce the risk of being seen as creepy, evil guys that governments want to take a very close look at, rein in the this tendency. People can walk away very fast now decent competition is emerging (see above Ads - to - Misery tale), and grumpy Governments can tie up a lot of time, cost and ultimately market access.

Those are the big things, the "A" class "Must Do's". Then there are the "B" Class things - are we going to throw more resource at them or cut our losses. The main ones are:

Focus - stop doing all the things you do, especially look at rationalising, and - er - firing:

3. Mobile - in or out? The Android value chain is as fragmented now as Olde Planet Mobile's ever was, so the value will be sucked up in the holes - and Apple will take the high ground, high rollers and high margins. Yes, the potential value is huge, but not as it is currently structured. Either take the whole market by the horns - ie get very serious, probably a major unit in its own right or even a spinout, or exit as anything more than a software house.

4. The GoogleCloud - can Google guarantee 5 '9's reliability? If not, its a pipe dream and it will fail to make money, and its probably consuming lot of resources - real time core value services do. In 5 '9's, deliver a hybrid strategy that works with partners' on-deck tools (like Mozilla for example, or even Microsoft), and exit anything bigger than cool tools for people with time on their hands (ie no need to be on the hook for real time delivery )

5. GooTube - Is it making money yet? Will it be at average unit profitability in the next 18 months? If not, kill it (or sell it to a Bigger Fool) - it's had enough time.

6. Chrome OS - Why?

7. Chrome Browser - Why? If its not at 20% market share by end 2011, kill.

8. As for the rest - the "C" class stuff - its a good time for the good old Star/Question mark/Dogs etc analysis, and anything not getting a "star" or "question mark with traction" rating gets shot straight away.

Future - where are the next things?

9. "New Search" - Yup, competition is emerging, the likely outcome in 5 years is a big No 1, smaller Nos 2 and 3, and then a small tail of niche operations. For the way to stay No. 1 for the next 5 years, see points 1 and 2 above. Prepare for the reality. "Social Search" is hyped to the nines, but if it can't make money in the medium term it will die, as did all the DotCom darlings. Traffic is not the same as money, and certainly not the same as profit. If anybody understands the economics of transaction messaging it's Google - get some smart people in a room, get them to work out what you have to believe for Facebook to make real money, and if you don't believe it, ignore them and tell all the remaining staff why it will die so they don't leave (and they will tell the press, never fear ). If you do believe it, then you have found where the leverage is, so hopefully the next Google product in the space is not the sort of things that only True Geeks can love.

10. The Next Big Thing - probably not going to be one big thing, stories like Google's original one are extremely rare. Search is Google's "big thing", the key therefore is to continuously innovate in Search.

Simples

Given Google's recent announcement that they are cleaning up the spam sites (see our article below) probably means that the "cr*p content" sites like Demand Media's ones will probably also not get top billing either, which willl significantly impact their IPO - and future profitability. Search Engine Land:

This announcement comes just as Demand Media gets set for an IPO. Demand owns eHow, LiveStrong.com, and several other properties that often get labeled as “content farms,” and is reportedly going to go public next week. AOL, with Seed.com and Yahoo, with its Associated Content purchase last year, are also in the content farm business. Those two, in fact, will be speaking on a panel called "Content Farms" Or The Smartest SEOs In the World? at our SMX West conference in March.

By cr*p I mean unhelpful given its prominence - eHow's advice is muchly of the level of the Feynman Problem Solving system

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write Down the Solution

Still, live by the SEO, die by the SEO. It would have happened eventually. But timing, as they say, is everything.....

Update - fascinating post by eHow's original owner Josh Hannah on why Google may rate it so highly:

Google seems to weight domain-level credibility very heavily, and to not be very good at understanding if individual pieces of content are any good. And historical credibility, once earned, seems to decay very slowly.

When I co-owned eHow, it had a bunch of really high quality content, in a time where the web had much less high quality content. (There has been a content explosion -- both high quality and content farm style -- since 2004-05, when it started to be economically feasible.) For the 20,000 articles on eHow at the time, we ranked in the top 2 results for exact searches on 99% of them, and I think justly so.

When Demand Media bought eHow, they built a content machine. It is my opinion that 80%+ of eHow's "credibility" with search engines was earned prior to 2007, yet 95% of their content was created after 2007. My view is that Google's algorithm is not well architected to deal with this kind of situation, where the domain is the same, but in essence the product is entirely new.


Possible reasons why Google doesn't manually degrade eHow:

- Google is in love with the idea of a pure, algorithmic, scalable solution to problems and will invest great energy in this before manually tweaking
- eHow addresses a lot of long-tail content topics, for many of which they are probably the best answer (even if they are not a great answer). The eHow algorithm for choosing which articles to write clearly takes this into account.
- eHow generates tens of millions in AdSense revenue for Google annually. Wikipedia generates none.
- Google has more pressing quality problems in product-focused areas, where it seems like the first ten search results are dominated by garbage product spam. Whatever you think of eHow, it's generally better than that.

Tut - wash yore mouth out on that last one, you're wrong sez Google and its Fanbois