What would happen if you had 90% of ALL the available data for EVERY aspect of your business? Wouldn’t that be a great competitive advantage?
Let’s say you are in the golf club business – and you could measure the following, and be correct to within 90% certainty:
- What relevant golf terms users typed into search engines?
- Given a set of search results, what links actually received clicks?
- How many competitor’s web sites are out there promoting golf items?
- How many pages do each of your competitor’s sites have?
- How does each of your competitor’s pages rank for a given search term?
- How does your competitors buy ads, how much do they pay, and how do those ads perform?
- What golf topics are most-often emailed by users?
- What are your competitor’s conversion rates? For organic search? PPC ads?
- How are your competitor’s customers paying for their items?
Wouldn’t it be great to have all of this intelligence? If you had all of this information, would you be 
fair with your competition, or would you use every bit of your power to crush it? In this intensely competitive marketplace, I know what your answer will be to my question.
But you do have a competitor now that is armed with all the above advantages – that would be Google itself.
You see, Google has ALL of the information I outlined above; and they got it from you and me. We provided all this data to them freely, by using Google’s services: Adwords, Adsense, Gmail, Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Checkout, Website Optimizer, etc. etc. They gave this stuff away free for a reason.
And now we see the chickens are coming home to roost. Read this post from the SEO Book Blog about the shrinking of the SERPS; also read this related post about the latest Panda update. Google is shrinking the screen real estate once allocated to everyone and is now pushing their own heavily monetized properties over the top of the results. When it comes to ranking on Google, you are never going to beat Google.
So has Google used it’s Dominion Over All Data to become evil? I think they are clearly headed in that direction. Google did recently drop their ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
What do you think? Post a comment.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Yes, of course they are evil. They are a corporation, and by their very nature corporations are evil. The only way to stop them is with government intervention.
I did a search several minutes ago on google and here is what it returned
1. Youtube
2. youtube
3 youtube
4. wikipedia
5. wikipedia
6. Amazon (this was not a product search)
Come on! Is that really a good result?
I try to use Bing whenever possible now in protest – but my brain is so programmed to use google that it’s tough
Great post Carl. Google have always been this way inclined, it’s just the more maverick among us to realise this and play them at their own game…
I fully agree. Companies like Google, Facebook and Paypal put themselves above all laws, all morale and all public opinion. They have only one interest, and it is spelled $$$$$$.
They make themselves unreachable, or at least extremely difficult to reach, with no or very well hidden information about address, phone number and email address. And if you manage to get in touch with them with a negative point of view, they will either not reply, or send a nonsense reply.
As I´m kind of old-timer in business, I´ve seen similar development before. As time goes, which might mean up to 10 – 15 years, they will be forced to change attitude due to new competition. But it´s a long time to wait when we want to to business now. Let´s hope they will fall as quickly as they rose.
Totally agree with you, google has already gathered a lot of information about their users, and continues to collect, would not repeat the scandalous history of both the apple iphone.
“I try to use Bing whenever possible now in protest – but my brain is so programmed to use google that it’s tough” – I think it is acceptable to google!