On Paul's disagreement scale this comment is right down in the sewer, but please pardon me while I vent:<p>How come Jeff is always grumbling about Apple's "Monopoly" on music and now Google's "Monopoly" on search but he never grumbles about Microsoft's actual monopoly on desktop operating systems and office back ends?<p>In this post he even calls out the people who grumble about Miscosoft and asks them to grumble about Google. But somehow, he never makes the connection that perhaps people who grumble about Apple and Google might want to do a little grumbling about Microsoft?<p>> I find that talent is far less important than enthusiasm.<p>--Jeff Atwood
Google may not be a monopoly, but they are certainly a single point of failure for many businesses. As such, these businesses should not be happy that their continued survival depends on some algorithm not flagging them a 'false positive'. Monopoly or not, I can't help but think that this is not a healthy situation.
The reason people find Google less objectionable than Microsoft is that it is far easier for the average consumer to switch search engines than it is for them to switch operating systems. So while Microsoft could force out better competitors, there's no way for Google to stop people from using another search engine. There just needs to be one that is worth switching to.
> I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic would be effectively unchanged.<p>Jeff missed a major point here.<p>What is ACTUALLY a disturbing thought is that if Google decided for any reason to de-list stackoverflow.com they would lose 83% of their traffic. Like that, in an instant.<p>Worse, they would be left with little or no recourse. Joel is probably enough of a big-wig that he could place a few calls in to Google or raise hell about it on his blog, but otherwise there is no one to talk to at Google or nothing to be done. I've read horror stories about this kind of thing here and there, and it's terrifying.<p>The comparisons to Micrsoft miss the mark, because Google is a different kind of monopoly and poses a different set of problems to a different group of people.
The single worst business decision I ever made was migrating a site on a .net extension over to the .com once the company bought it without making damn sure not to lose rankings in Google. I had heard that permanent redirects preserved pagerank/googleness, but dropped from top 5 on some important terms to outside the front page. This single poor decision/poor execution cost me and the company tens of thousands of dollars, which is orders of magnitude higher than the additional credibility the .com would've brought.<p>I suppose I had to learn that lesson sooner or later, so I'll go glass-half-full and be grateful that it was on tens of thousands early in life, instead of more later. But that was a pretty expensive lesson.
This page, linked from the article, is also a nice read: <a href="http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html" rel="nofollow">http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid...</a><p><i>Whimsley Hall is now strewn, like Miss Haversham's house, with cobwebs and dust. Most visitors no longer come in by the front door to take a tour. Instead, Mr. Google (a travel agent who doubles as our butler) directs them straight down to the basement where the family archives are kept and tells them to look at one particular historical document called The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later. They read this and then they walk right out.</i>
My brother has a site that has just gone dark on Google. This is a site that uses no SEO "techniques" - it's just a plain site with content and a form to buy a product (not software) that actually uses Google's own "Checkout". Oddly, it turns up OK on Google's image search but never makes it into the regular key word search results.<p>Obviously, investigations are on-going but it is a worrying that a site supporting a legitimate commercial venture should just disappear from Google and thus (in effect) from the Internet.
Have there existed good alternatives or proposals for alternatives to google that people haven't heard about possibly because google doesn't return them?