I don’t say it lightly. They’ve pioneered a lot with online search and their Gmail has proven to the world that the market likes “labels” instead of “folders”… not sure why no other email engines have figured that out. Perhaps it’s related to the fact that software is often written by programmers—who tend to think in terms of “exclusive categories” and Norton Commander/DOS file-system directories, forgetting that conversations affect more than one topic at a time.
But… back to Google…
How did they become famous? Why did we like them? What made them different?
AOL earned itself an early reputation for being the first and only company that found a way to spam our snail mail boxes with software. We “marked” them accordingly.
Yahoo! …it’s in the name itself: excitement. But, excitement about what? I mean, if your brand get’s people’s adrenaline going, they’ll quickly leave unless there’s a good reason.
And then there’s Google… what does the word even mean? Still, no one knows. “Google” was redefined by every search, every email, ever picture, every map, every document… Google never locked itself into any one category. That’s why we liked them.
Free email storage was a good idea, openness, freedom—just like their Gmail labels. But, as my “free gigabytes” on Gmail continue to rise, so does the percentage of my usage. …I feel the net closing around my Internet… we all do… and none of us like where it’s going.
Then, there’s the fact that Google Search has the best spell checker, yet Google Chrome has the worst spell checker. What’s that about?
Google Earth was excellent and thorough… even showing us how to poorly airbrush satellite photos… okay? I mean, that was inevitable. Of course governments have secret facilities and military bases they don’t want other governments to know about. We know MI6 and CIA have secrets. It’s okay. But, air brushing them? Don’t insult the public’s “intelligence” either. At least have a sense of humor and put a SimCity™ ad in those places.
And we won’t even get into the bad vibes associated with the NSA.
Cloak and snare with the “free storage” and “free listing” on services like Froogle, along with the forseeable information leaks to government, weren’t the only market betrayal from Google. That was all to be expected and we can’t complain. Their big problem is Google Search. The search engine was where it began… and that’s where it will end.
With their new “tailored” searches, using your personal information to refine your search results to stuff you’re supposedly interested in… Google nominalized themselves.
The whole idea of Internet search is to find stuff we don’t know. Of course we’ll seem more interested in stuff we’re already familiar with. That’s why we liked Google ten years ago: They showed us information we weren’t already interested in—and it expanded our horizons. Now that our search interests are “tailored”… there won’t be much difference between the search results of Google and the search results of your Windows desktop.
Will Smith didn’t want his toaster—or his robot—talking back to him. We men don’t like it when a woman tries to read our minds. I don’t think the public wants Google to do that either. Tailored search systems are complex, they use technology, they are based on information… but are they useful to search the Internet, only to find that, at the end of the day, Google’s giving us a sophisticated look in the mirror? I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all.
Google complains that it can’t search private profiles on Facebook? Why do they want access to our private info?—As if confiding in Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t enough. Why stop there? Why not open up our computer desktops to be searchable by the public… and let Google’s “tailored search results” decide whether you’d be interested in my paintshop art from junior high. The public doesn’t care that the Apple App store isn’t searchable by Google. If we want to search Apple, we’ll go to Apple. That’s the way it ought to be. But Google seems to want access to everything, then hide their satellite photos of some random mountain—??
With “tailored” search results, why do they even want to search Apple’s database?—So they can skip over all the new ideas Apple would give us that Google’s “tailored” searches won’t? No thanks. I’m starting to see, now, why Steve Jobs hated Google so much. In Steve’s last presentation, with iCloud, he summarized his product concept from the beginning, “It just works.” But we can’t say that about Google anymore… they went and built it a brain. Now, Google’s as biased as FOX and CNN… not quite as biased as NBC, though. But don’t worry, they’ll get there.
Did Gary Brolsma (the Numa Numa guy) make his video go viral through an SEO budget? Um… NO. Gary didn’t advertise. Superbowl advertisers went to GARY. See, that’s the thing with marketing… People don’t talk to their friends about perfumed pigs… they talk about stuff that doesn’t NEED dressing up. That’s why we liked Gary. He was unpolished, normal, authentic… and still cool… just like the rest of us. And today’s Google search might have tried to tell us that we wouldn’t be interested in someone who’s normal.
It’s not the name “Google” that made us use them for searches. It was their objective look at the Internet. But not anymore. They don’t like being censored in China, but now they want to censer us… Show’s over.
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