Google’s
purchase of Writely sort of drove me over the edge last week. When I saw the
news confirmed, I exclaimed out loud to myself, “Oh, give me a break.” A break
from what, freakishly talking to myself? No, a break from Google going in yet
another direction when there is so much stuff they haven’t finished, gotten
right or need to fix.
Honestly, if Google wants to be as “ubiquitous as brushing your teeth” (see
here from
October and here
earlier this month), then they need to make sure the Google toothpaste tastes
good or that you can squeeze it out of the Google toothpaste tube (beta) without
it getting all clogged up.
I normally loathe Google-specific articles, because the constant “Google,
Google, Google” obsession of such articles continue to put the
Marcia Brady
of search in the spotlight when the Jans of the world deserve greater
attention. They also tend to credit Google too much or blaming it for problems that others have, as well.
Despite that loathing, I’m making a personal exception this time. Perhaps a
little Google fixation will be just the cathartic experience I need to cleanse
my jaded search soul. Consider this an open letter to a company I’ve been
writing about since before it was formally a company, a to do list of things it
would be nice to have completed, a hope for an operational pause in the land
grab it has embarked upon.
Originally, this was to be called “100 Things I Hate About Google.” I suppose
it’s good news that by the time I reached the twenties, I started running out of
steam. Then again, I’ve also got other things to do. I’m sure I’ve missed pet peeves that others have. Don’t worry. After you work
through my list, you can contribute your own via a forum link at the end.
Remember, just because there’s much I hate doesn’t mean there’s not a lot I love. In
fact, anyone in a relationship knows that often the people you can hate the most
are the same people that you love the most. You know them intimately; you want
perfection. So on the love side, see my
25 Things I Love About Google post.
1. Web search counts that make no sense.
“
Why do search engines lie?” has Robert Scoble recently poking at this, on how
the reported counts don’t always match reality. Heck, try
class two
contributions with “about” 59,800,000 matches. But then you
find that only 879 are considered non-duplicates! Meanwhile,
mars landing sites gives 1,050,000 matches while
mars landing sites earth gives nearly double that amount, 1,840,000
listings. It shouldn’t. Adding that extra word should give you a subset of the
original query. It should come back with less results, not more. I know, I know.
It’s a bug, or search counts are hard to do, or they do say “about.” I know,
they aren’t the only ones, nor have they been the first (see
Questioning
Google’s Counts,
Danny & Tristan Talk About Link Counts, Site Counts & Index Auditing and
Who’s The
Biggest Of Them All?). Long experience in knowing the counts don’t add up
has perhaps left me numb to the issue. And
goodness
knows, I don’t want a return to page counts on the home page. But then
again, if you are going to put out a number, perhaps it should be accurate?
2. Despite results clustering, Google keeps
serving up sites you’ve seen. You may not know the name results clustering,
but you recognize Google doing it. That’s when it sees there’s more than one
page from a web site that might match what you are looking for, so it “indents”
the second best one below the first. Search for
books, and you’ll see this
happening with Amazon. But clustering only happens on a results page-by-results
page basis. In other words, look at
mars landing sites,
and there’s a link to a page at the msss.com domain near the bottom. Say you
reject this. Go to the next page, and msss.com is back again, as is the BBC. If
I rejected content from these sites the first time, I want to see something new.
Try whirlpool s20d,
and you’ll see the same thing. Lycos.co.uk and householdappliances.kelkoo.co.uk
both come back. Give me the best page from a domain once, then give me some
variety, not these second chances.
3. Stop confusing people. Pick a user interface
and go with it! Google keeps testing and testing various UIs. If I had the
time and energy, I’d take all the screenshots people have posted and put them
into a single “Google of the future” page. Then again, they probably wouldn’t
commit. Enough with the testing! Decide on something and go with it, then change
it later if you need to. This constant UI testing over the past year has had
people wondering if they’ve been hit by adware/spyware and recently, whether you are
questioning
their sexual orientation! At least if you’re going to test, do what I
suggested and
tell the small number of people who care this, to save us from a billion people
having to blog about the “discovery” of something new. But do commit, so that as
I’ve written,
your lack of consistency doesn’t put you down the path that killed AltaVista.
4. Bring on related searches. Back in 2000
or 2001, Chris Sherman and I asked Sergey Brin during a lunch visit why Google
lacked tools to help people better narrow in on what they are looking for. Why
no “related searches” option? His response was that unless a lot of people use a
feature, Google didn’t want to devote space to it. Fair enough, but query
refinement is important. It can help people, and Google remains oddly lacking in
not having it. It pops up as part of the UI tests. Get it out there.
Robert Scoble
Wants What We Had — Better Query Refinement. So Do I! covers more on why
this would be helpful.
5. Easier access to all your tools. Life at
Google is more than web, images, groups, news, Froogle and local. Maybe I want
to switch to mobile search, book search, catalog search or yes yes yes blog
search with an easy click from the existing query I’ve done. I can’t. I can’t
even if I use your toolbar. Many of these
services remain in “visit
directly” mode. Please fix that. Yahoo
lets me add new
tabs. Ask
lets me plus I can move things around. Awesome. Do the same, please.
6. Make Google.com show the same results
regardless of country. You have country-specific editions. They give people
the option to choose if they want a country skew. Given this, don’t
automatically skew anyway if someone has chosen to search the entire web. It’s
confusing when different people in different countries are comparing results.
See Blair “Liar”
Linkbomb Highlights Country-Specific Skewing for more on this.
7. RSS feed for web search. OK, I know the
results don’t change much, and I know that RSS feeds of web search that
Yahoo and
MSN offer are
hardly winning over mass numbers of users. Still, why not? Since you offer RSS
for news search results and other things, let me monitor web search the same
way.
8. Use of Open Directory titles & descriptions:
You know plenty of webmasters don’t like having their titles and
descriptions replaced by Open Directory material. Give them the option to tell
you no, on this front. Details
here; push ahead and make it a reality.
9. Stop caching pages: I was all for opt-out
with cached pages until a court
gave you
far more right to reprint anything than anyone could have expected. Now you’ve
got to make it opt-in. You helped create the caching mess by just assuming it
was legal to reprint web pages online without asking, using opt-out as your
cover. Now you’ve had that backed up legally, but that doesn’t make it less
evil.
10. Give us paid web search support: Folks
are still obsessing about being listed in Google. They worry they’ve been banned
and any number of other problems. Give them a guaranteed support mechanism. Poor
Matt Cutts — his blog is going to collapse under the comments of
Cuttlets flocking
there in lieu of other alternatives.
11. Give advertisers the ability to pick and
choose in search: It took you years to almost grudgingly
give
advertisers the ability to pick-and-choose what content sites they have their
ads appear on, despite them wanting this from day one. We had lame excuses that
you didn’t want to “confuse” or “overwhelm” them with options. OK, now you’ve
done good by giving them choice. Let them also decide if they want to
pick-and-choose in the search ads space, as well.
12. Be more responsive to click fraud
complaints: I’ve heard from too many advertisers who have felt over the
years like they’re making something up when they come forth with click fraud
concerns. You’re
promising to do better. Please deliver. Make them feel supported. Work with
the third parties. Help them help you be successful, not sued again.
13. Make AdWords once again a program that
links ads to keywords for advertisers and publishers; AdSense a program that
contextually places ads and DomainSense a program that puts ads on parked
domains. Having AdWords as the program that puts ads into Adsense For
Search/Content/Domains is confusing. More
here. Also make DomainSense a third channel that can be purchased
independently of the other two. It’s not necessarily bad traffic there. Might even
be better. But it should be a standalone choice.
14. Break out search revenues from other types
of ad revenues. We can’t know the state of health for actual search
advertising — advertising where an ad appears if someone’s actually entered a
search term — if it’s lumped in among your AdSense for content revenues. Please
don’t contribute to the
contextual
pollution. It’ll hurt you down the line if one channel starts to weaken and
the other remains healthy. Failure to breakout means that people will assume all
of “search” is having trouble.
15. Put the brakes on self-serve AdSense.
We knew AdSense was on its way to replacing Amazon’s affiliate program for
generating crap content when the first “earn millions on AdSense” guides came
out. A search for adsense
on Google even gives me an ad for someone selling over 100 “adsense ready”
content sites that people can buy. Is this what you want to fund? An economy
where everyone and their brother and sister shoves up the same content, which
you then index, which is essentially the same thing? I know the self-serve
program has helped you dominate the contextual space. But you fuel so much junk!
Can’t you be more selective? Give more money to the people who are really
working to produce information rather than just ad revenues.
16. Stop giving
away Blogger for free. It’s just full of junk. Junk, junk, junk. If you let
anyone have it with no barriers, surprise, some are going to take it and do bad
things with it.
Problems With Splogs & Time-Based Searching covers how you’ve reinvented
free home page spam that sucked in the 90s. Why are you allowing it again now?
Charge people even a token amount ($1 even), and that will be a big barrier.
Who’s going to ding you for charging a $1 start-up fee that you can levy through
Google Payments? If you must give away for free, find a better, more trusted
mechanism to partner with schools or others. Or make all Blogger blogs banned
from being spidered for the first 30 days and open them up after that upon
review. If that’s not perfect, then figure something else out. But do something.
17. Act fast on copyright infringement at
Blogger. The worst thing about Google Blog Search is that it makes it even
easier for me to see who is stealing my content. And many of them are doing it
via Blogger. If I have time later, I’ll document the Byzantine process it takes
to inform you of copyright infringement. Then after a week, you eventually ask
for a lengthy DMCA request to be filled out. I don’t have time to do one of
these every five minutes that you allow someone to infringe my content without
barrier on your service. Have some humanity. Use some common sense. Have someone
actually look at what your told. In about 30 seconds, you can generally tell the
crap site reported for stealing is indeed a crap site you should remove. Shut them down under a
terms of service violation rather than running for cover and helping no one on
the DMCA route.
18. Fix Gmail’s “custom from” problem. If
you’re going to let me send things as if I have my own mail server, then
actually ensure that people really believe I have my own mail server. Your “Custom From” problem that I cover
here is causing people to
think they have to send now to both my “real” domain and my Gmail address. I
have my own SMTP server. I used yours because I wanted to archive my outgoing
mail. But I and others can’t do this if you don’t fulfill the promise that we’d
have our own domain in the From field. Charge me if you have to, but fix it.
19. Let Gmail display more than 100 items.
After archiving 50,000 messages 100 items at a time, I really
wished for the ability to
view more than 100 items per page. I still want that when I’m having to review
about 300 spam items per day. This can’t be that hard. Can’t we have it?
20. Let Gmail have customized blacklists.
You do a good job catching spam, but you’re not perfect. I have no way of
filtering out what you are missing, to help you get better. I explain more
here. Work with Mailwasher,
and I’ll especially think you rock.
21. Give me a list of all my referring
pages in Google Analytics and make them clickable. C’mon. WebTrends has
offered stuff like this since, I dunno, WebTrends 1.0? But in Google Analytics,
I have to go to Referral Conversion, then see individual URLs rolled up under
sites, then cut and paste things if I want to go to the page that sent me
traffic. It could, and should, be much easier.
22. Stop opening products to everyone,
then getting overwhelmed. The story is getting tiring. Everyone’s invited to
use Google Web Accelerator, then you pull it down. Come get Google Analytics,
then you shut it down to newcomers to demand. Come get Google Page Creator, then
it closes (Missed out? Just go use Yahoo
GeoCities). You know whatever you roll out is going to get overwhelmed.
Figure out another way to open it up. The demand is no longer making it seem
like your products are hot. It’s making it seem like you are lame and can’t anticipate or handle the
rush.
23. Charge for things! Seriously, I’m
getting frightened. I love that anyone can get free analytics, email, you name
it from you. But I’m fearful that people also can’t get support for when things
go wrong. I think this
guy’s still trying to get an official response on what happened to his lost
Gmail account. Meanwhile, I worry that companies I want competing with you, to
keep you on your toes, can’t do so when you use advertising to underwrite
everything. It just feels anti-competitive. Plus, aren’t you kind of sick of
shoving ads at us everywhere? Don’t I have enough ads on the floor of my
supermarket already? Can’t part of Google’s mission be to help reduce
advertising in places where I don’t need it?
24. Remember it’s not about selling.
Google Video started with searchable TV content. That got
dropped when
the new video sales began. OK, the official line is that you’re working with
providers about bringing back the TV content. The unspoken truth is you can’t
cut those deals to sell TV entertainment shows without dropping the taping. But
do work on ways to bring it back. Yes, there’s a reason why video search is
closely related to video shopping. But being able to keyword search across
things like news shows or popular references in entertainment content was
informational. And that’s your mission, right? Organize the world’s information,
not just sell TV shows. Similarly, as you begin to sell books or build out the
Google Base content, don’t just become an Amazon or eBay alternative.
25.
Fix the philosophy. I’ve written
before about
how your philosophy page has a big disconnect with reality. It feels even
further disconnected these days. You’re doing 100 different things rather than
“one thing really, really well.” As for “you can make money without doing evil,”
you know that’s not so when you yourselves created an
evil scale to
decide just how bad bowing to Chinese censorship would be for you. Give us a
realistic philosophy, one that doesn’t give you so far to fall from lofty
heights. We’ll like you more for it, rather than the excuses and spin when you
can’t do what you say you should do.
Want to add your own gripes? Disagree with mine? Please visit our
What Do You
Hate About Google? thread at the Search Engine Watch Forums.
Postscript:
“”
Hey! This philosophy is past its expiration date from Doug Edwards over at
Xooglers has some nice background on how the philosophy page came to be, since
he drafted up the original one 🙂
Meanwhile, my list made Digg
here, where
I’ve answered a variety of criticisms about it from Diggers. Most of the critics
don’t really seem to have actually read my article much less any of the extended
explanations I pointed at. But despite being called “idiot” repetitively and
accused of not being “grown up” enough because my name is Danny, I’ve tried to
explain some of the issues more. You may find those explanations interesting.
Certainly reading the trolling and scorn is fun! For the record (like it really
matters), I’m Danny because that’s my name. It’s not Dan or Daniel. It’s
actually Danny.
Postscript 2: First Digged, now Matted (Cutted? Cuttsed?). Google’s
Matt Cutts says his
Google++ post is just for Googlers only, but I’m sure he won’t mind if you
give it a read. He has briefly disagrees with me on some points, which is cool
and understandable. But he also encourages others at Google to take up some of
what I’ve written as a bug report, which is very much in line with my thinking.
And I’ll say again, these are just my suggestions. If you’ve got your own,
things that you’d especially like to see Google work on, post them in our
forum thread or on Matt’s blog. I know Google won’t solve all of my or your
requests — but perhaps we’ll see more of these taken care of, along with cool
new things to come.