Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
Google has long enjoyed a benign image in the general population, a situation that has served them well when they got into gray areas like caching content and, more recently, book copying. In the last few days, though, Google seems to be working to undo their image as a bunch of nice guys who are just trying to make stuff easy to find.
First, the New York Times quoted Google co-founder Sergey Brin as dismissing Yahoo’s claim to have a much bigger index than Google. Brin suggested that if Yahoo had more pages indexed, it was because they were counting duplicate content that Google discarded rather than indexing. Yahoo denied the claim and stood by its original count. While it’s not odd that search engine companies might differ over how meaningful index size is for search quality, it was a bit of a surprise to see Brin jumping into the fray and attacking Yahoo.
On the heels of the “my-index-is-bigger-than-yours” dispute, Google took the unusual step of blacklisting CNet reporters for a year in retaliation for a story they ran which disclosed personal information for Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO. The point of the story was to demonstrate how much personal information could be obtained via Google. The story, which ran a month ago, gave Schmidt’s salary, address and neighborhood details, and other data. Considering that all this information could be found in public documents using Google, penalizing CNet for a full year seemed to many to be a bit over the top. MSN Filter’s new tech blog jumped on the bandwagon with Just Don’t Google Me, amusingly suggesting
We would like to suggest some keywords for Mr.Schmidt to Google, starting with “public figure,” “public relations problem,” and “good for the gander.”
Neither of these PR flaps is of great significance. One wonders, though, how long Google can continue to maintain its teflon image. Special interest groups like web and book publishers have already had their doubts, and if Google comes out with guns blazing (that’s a metaphor, Google is opposed to firearms 
) whenever they are criticized they’ll start to make the rest of the population doubters as well.
All the Google news isn’t bad, of course. Google has made some major outreach moves to webmasters, notably bringing a cadre of ten engineers to the last WebmasterWorld conference to chat with attendees, and then reprising the popular event at Search Engine Strategies. And, as we reported a few days ago, senior engineer Matt Cutts has started blogging. With a bit more of Matt’s light touch and humor, and a little less ham-fisted aggressiveness, Google might be able to keep its image shiny a bit longer.
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[…] When CNET published Google to Yahoo: Ours is bigger, they did more than report on the boasts and counter-boasts of the biggest search engines. Without fanfare, they also signaled the quick end to what was supposed to be a year-long ban on talking to CNET reporters. (See Google - No More Mr. Nice Guy.) […]
Pingback by » Google Quietly Ends CNET Ban - rogerd’s notebook 09.29.05 @ 6:35 pm