I'm taking a break from my ususal PPC vs. SEO discussion to give some random thoughts on the state of search, both SEO and PPC.
* What happened to "Jeeves" from "Ask Jeeves"? Looks like he got fired and is living on the Island of Lost Dot-Com Mascots, along with the pets.com sock puppet.
* Why does Google have so much power to control the fate of online businesses? Someone sued them recently because Google removed them from their listings, supposedly because they did stuff to try to manipulate their rankings. Their business went down by a third. While Google has every right to do this -- it's a private, unpaid service -- it's not really fair. They alone can impact the success or failure of a site, more so than any other search engine.
* MSN search has finally launched in a limited way. Many advertisers have gotten beta accounts and have been testing out their PPC ads. I think in 10 years, Google will be fairly irrelevant. Short the stock now!
* Many people are starting to realize that the quality of Google results are not so great. I personally feel they put too much emphasis on popularity and not enough on actual relevance. Many people are starting to favor Yahoo! or Ask. I personally like Metacrawler, which returns results from a variety of engines at once.
* About a year ago, Google made some changes to improve the quality of paid ads and cut down all those eBay and Amazon ads that appeared on every single search. Remember those ads that said "Get your [INSERT ANY WORD] at eBay!". Well, it seems to have worked for the most part. For those affiliates that always ran quality ads, it basically reduced competition.
* If you haven't seen the David Hasselhoff video "Hooked On A Feeling", you haven't lived life. You can get it on any number of sites, including youtube.com. It's addicting. I'm going to start a therapy group - I can't stop watching it.
That's it for now. Contact me at
doug@hotrocketinc.com
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Doug's Movie Quote of the Week
From
Animal House
Dean Vernon Wormer: Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
