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Comcast’s DNS servers are terrible. That’s why I switched to OpenDNS – it’s a good thing.

That being said, sometimes OpenDNS is annoying. Sometimes I see their ‘typo’ pages when I really shouldn’t be.

But their recent blog post shows how bad it could be, if you go with Google and Dell’s malware that now comes standard with your Dell.

I think this is a scaling issue with Google growing quickly. The basic philosophy of Google is good: make money through ads people actually want to see, remember the user is the customer not the advertiser. I like that philosophy, even though it’s lofty and idealistic. They should stick to it.

BTW here’s an example of Google’s typo squatting pages

I’ve been playing around with Lucovsky’s new Ajax Feeds API and I have to say it’s a vast improvement from the ‘search api’, which is really just a widget you can stick on your blog to serve google ads you get no money for.

But the Feeds Api has a lot lower overhead and is cleaner. As Niall Kennedy points out, it’s still 5k of bloatware and 2 extraneous requests heavy, but if you’re living on the edge you can just point at the unofficial endpoint.

Lucovsky wrote me and warned me about using the endpoint though:

Be careful about encouraging people to go directly to the /Gfeeds endpoint. The API is obviously very new and this endpoint and its protocol will certainly change, on a whim, as needed. Anyone coding to this raw URL form without proper support from us will likley get themselves into a bit of trouble…

At one point I was using the great ‘unofficial’ google rss feeds via Google Feed reader. Google feed reader published any rss feed, in a standard format, cached appropriately with auto-added guids. That worked great for months, but then they decided to cut off the service, which was unofficial anyways to be honest, cutting off a bunch of work I had done.

Anyways all in all it looks like Google is going in the right direction at least with their Ajax APIs.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much the fact that Google owns search does to change the web.

Of course I’m not suggesting that I think Google referred traffic isn’t nice, but the fact that it’s the only search engine people really use nowadays means that the web is becoming more of a monoculture.

When I think about design of SWiK originally, I put some thought into SEO, but now I put vastly more thought into it, because being listed in Google is a really big deal.

I was reading this article , where Steve puts a lot of vitriol in his “Demolition Man” argument that western civilization is on the decline. What struck me as curious is he censored his language in his post, obscuring a letter in swear words with !.

Steve later posts in the comments:

Derek, I use sh!t instead of the real word, because I read that google penalizes sites with certain words.

It’s somewhat ironic that someone posting on the value of freedom would submit to Google’s grip on the web.

All of this is a function of 1 algorithm ruling the entire web. What if it changes? Entire businesses may fall by the wayside.

Here’s a quote from a PBS interview of san francisco porn blogger Violet Blue who was eradicated from Google in one of their anti-porn changes

“It’s more than frustrating for small businesses — it’s a death sentence,” she said. “Google has too much power…It’s something that we might not have ever seen in history. It’s not just small businesses but for someone like me as a blogger, I might be naive, but I have this principle of believing in self-publishing on the web. I count on a democratic dissemination of information rather than from the channels we’ve always been getting it from…When Google breaks, suddenly that’s gone and I don’t have that principle to rely on. We won’t have that diversity of voices if we can’t find anyone.”

I don’t have any answers on this one. The power law distribution of free choice is going to create a monoculture on its own. This is probably something we’re just going to have to live with until people figure out a better way to find things online. Until then publishers are going to have two audiences: their audiences and Google’s algorithm.

I noticed Google put a big advertisement that’s not marked as an advertisement on their front page.

Google won by being simple and by not compromising user experience for short term profit motives.

People like Google ads because they are relevancy ranked, and put in a separate section to the search results, and they trust them because they trust Google to be uncompromising in giving good links.

Recently even Googler Matt Cutts came out against Google’s attempt to use ‘tips’ (unmarked advertisements) to get some free and broad advertising for their less successful services.

He describes them thusly:

Here’s why these recent Google tips went over the line for me personally: they’re often poorly targeted or irrelevant.

There’s a lot of hubris at the Googleplex, and they have a scale problem of a huge number of people wanting their projects to succeed where before there was only search. Ultimately everything peaks, and Google’s time will come too, and this is how they will blow it, the same way their forebears blew it: by filling their front page with junk and screwing with their search results for money.

There’s an interesting blogpost today about Google’s possible abuse of the adwords system.

Google holds the top advertisement (Adword) slot for the following key words: intranet, spreadsheet, documents, calendar, word processor, email, video, instant messenger, blog, photo sharing, online groups, maps, start page, restaurants, dining, and books (somehow Amazon has managed to appear in the #1 ad slot for ‘books’).

Now normally I would have said this is a smart move by Google. They get to promote their products and dogfood their own money making AdWords at the same time. What’s bad though is that they seem to have so little faith in the AdWords relevancy system that they are opting out of it – they automatically usurp the top paying advertiser. This is probably not disclosed to AdWords buyers, that there are certain terms where you will not have the possibility of gaining the top spot, no matter how relevant your ad is or how much you pay.

Ok, well even so I would be inclined to side with Google, maybe in the interests of editorial purity they could label their adwords differently or present them as ‘one-box’ results – however I think a greater question needs to be addressed: what about the Googleopoly?

Google has a monopoly on search, that’s as real and substantial as the Microsoft monopoly on operating systems. And as such, they control the advertising market for search ads, the biggest and most effective channel for internet advertising there is. So if you are a little guy, how can you compete with Google, taking the top spot and pushing you off the page? It’s like Netscape competing with Microsoft – tougher going.

Shouldn’t there be a fair playing field? Either Microsoft shouldn’t have to run their business on tiptoes to avoid stepping into the areas of monopolistic abuse, or Google should admit they have a monopoly and take steps to draw back and let their individual products stand on their own merits without leveraging their monopoly on search to promote them.

Jacob Nielsen’s Alertbox published an article at the beginning of this year in which he put forth an argument that said:

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

This provocative thesis is backed by a compelling analysis of Google’s business model.

Basically, if you are a company that produces widgets at $5 a hogshead, it’s worth it to you to pay $4.99 in commissions to Google for each sale they deliver. And because you are in competition for who gets the advertising with other companies that produce widgets – if you pay less than $4.99, you won’t get an ad at all.

Google thus profits from a situation where online business turn over all their profits to the gatekeeper of the web – so that they can make the penny of profit over their competitors.

This is an interesting argument. Basically he advises you to develop more cost effective channels of marketing, where you can the same amount of click through activity for a lower cost. Despite this being easier said than done, this is good advice.

But what about the impact on the consumer. “When companies compete, you win” is the mantra of the capitalist. The idea being that competition drives prices down and quality up.

Unfortunately, this idea doesn’t work very well with Google’s marketplace. The reason is: Google has no pricing or quality information in their ads. If you search for widgets: you don’t know that although the top result charges $9 for crappy widgets, the bottom result charges $3 for great widgets and good service.

Let’s back up a minute to you and your widget company. You are happily producing widgets at $5 a hogshead, your competitors realize this and pay $4.99 to wipe you off the map, so you pay $4.99 to stay in the running.

Here’s where it gets bad for the consumer. (In other words, there’s a reason if you know what you are doing on the net, you’ll rarely buy via a ‘Google’ Adwords ad).

Your competitors think for a while and realize that if they raised their prices and charged $9 for widgets, they could pay Google $8.99 for ads and wipe you off the map again. Now if you want traffic, you are going to have to pay the gatekeeper $8.99 a sale and raise your price to keep up with it.

Uh oh, now Google is causing raised prices across the board, bad news for the consumer. This is a natural trend for advertising, which is always competitive – the reason for $12+ ticket prices at the movie theater are not so as much bigger budget flicks, as much as huge movie advertising costs. (“Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Paramount—spent, on average, $34.8 million to advertise a movie and earned, on average, just $20.6 million per title.”)

This is not to say the prices of advertisement on Google will trend ever skyward. Although Google has a monopoly on web search, as Jacob points out: they don’t control all channels. Brick and mortar prices can have memorable prices or offer ‘lowest cost’ deals – Very strong brands like Amazon and Newegg can create stores where they gain a reputation for generally low prices and go there and do at least a price check, if they don’t go there first.

And that’s how I do my purchasing through trusted brands or recommended sellers – not through Google Adwords, a system that rewards and promotes vendors for not offering a quality product, but rather for giving up profits to Google and writing misleading advertisements.

Another alternative is Craigslist or Ebay. Both of these have models for real markets, where people compare prices and quality of goods / sellers, rather than just catchy advertisements.

Google just agreed to pay MySpace $900 million for the rights to advertising on the site for 3 years.

First of all, I bet they feel foolish they didn’t just buy MySpace when they had the opportunity, which turned out to be cheap at the price at $250 million dollars.

But $900 million for 3 years just feels like too much money to me, how can they possibly profit on that deal? Let’s do some off the cuff math:

$900 million over 3 years is $300 million a year. There are 50 million users. That means that each user must generate $6 in advertising clicks every year just for Google to break even, which is far off from the margins that Google gets on search advertising. $6 bucks doesn’t sound like that much though, but let’s break it down:

• Google makes a dime off of every search page view
• MySpace currently makes more like 3 or 4 cents for each page view.

Let’s assume they can target advertising more effectively just for kicks, about doubling the revenue and making 6 cents a page view.

6 bucks divided by 6 cents is 100. Every user needs to visit MySpace pages 100 times every year, just for Google to break even on their deal.

That’s pretty optimistic. It’s one thing to have a large number of registered users, quite another to have them checking back to the site twice a week on average.

And the margins…

Google spends a little bit of money just to distribute ads and run their million+ server farm and cook organic pork for their employees’ dinner. To maintain their margins and not even live up to expected gains in margins, they will need to earn back at the very least $1.25 billion in advertising on MySpace within 3 years. That’s a big number.

So why did they do the deal? In the long view, Google wants to be the only web advertising outfit out there. If they can kill off Yahoo or Microsoft’s interest in competition on those fronts, like they are moving well on with web search, they will get the whole market to themselves and corner the market on web advertising: with customers bidding against each other to set the price of the ads.

Of course MySpace is still growing frenetically, so maybe Google just wants to speculate on increased use and ride the wave on the way up :/

Check this out:

What I’ve always wanted from Google Calendar is to be able to use it in the same way that people have re-used Google Maps, as a platform for every random cool hack you can think of.

One thing that I’ve already done, following a tip from Google Blogoscoped, is subscribe to new movies and new dvd releases calendars, so that I can see on my month view, what movies are coming out in various weeks.

It was kind of tricky to add those cals, but these badges can make stuff like that a lot easier, and I will be really interested to see what kind of things people think of for me to subscribe to, and with rumors of an API, I’m hopeful for more on that front as well.

The badges are fairly customizable, and you can pick other kinds if you want:

Here’s a link to the new Google Calendar publisher guide

There’s one race that makes the other races look lilliputian in comparision: GYM.

Google Yahoo MSN are currently engaged in pitched battle for online supremecy. 2006 Marks the rise of Google to take supremecy over the other 2, who have mostly rested on their laurels until the Google threat arrived but are slowly investing in their widely used online services again as their reach fades:

(Alexa)

The reason Google has taken over is likely due to the introduction of their competitive services that have been slowly stealing market share, chiefly GMail, which now according to Alexa statistics has just over 10% of Hotmail’s reach.

Hotmail is almost the entirety of Microsoft’s online, a service that ironically is one of the worst in online email providers. Microsoft also is investing in a search engine that a significant percentage of people do use, as well as spaces and msn financial that attract a fair audience.

Microsoft has been doing the worst of GYM. There have been big shakeups in the MSN department at Microsoft very recently, so maybe Microsoft will somehow be able to drag itself back into relevancy one more time.

Yahoo has the most diverse portfolio of projects, that are all somewhat popular in their own right, and they have a more sophisticated set of business principles attached to each project, charging premium access fees to the small percentage of users who need more than basic features.

Nevertheless, Yahoo is also on a downward trend, and it seems like Yahoo as well is moving away from their concept of the Internet as just another mass media outlet and towards betting on the idea of the web as a read/write medium, with aquisitions of innovative companies like del.icio.us and Flickr.

The next 6 months for these companies are going to be interesting, each will be launching new products and taking products out of beta, and it seems like there are shakeups in the works internally for all three companies.

Google does one thing that really bothers me: it keeps all information about itself absolutely secret and lies and misleads the public to maintain that secrecy. For a company that sees itself as the stewards of the world’s information, this is troubling behavior.

The pattern of strict information control especially reveals itself on Google’s official blog.

In their recent post explaining the motivation behind Google’s new program to assist China in the repression of their people, Google completely leaves out any mention of their most glaringly obvious motivating influence: money. Despite the spin in this post about Google’s ‘mission’, the plain truth is that Google is willing to compromise ethical considerations simply because they are worried about losing ground to Chinese search startups, Microsoft and Yahoo in one of the worlds most potentially lucrative markets.

A better post from Google would have said yes, Google is interested in China’s money but is being forced to behave unethically in order to compete in their market. They could then go on to support industry standards defining rules for acceptable behavior in the market. Only with a cooperative front can the web companies avoid racing to the bottom on censorship capitulation.

Instead follows a pattern of lies and spin. Just one month ago Marissa Mayer claimed of Google,

Biased results? No way. Providing great search is the core of what we do. Business partnerships will never compromise the integrity or objectivity of our search results.

At least her post hasn’t been erased from existence.

If Google sincerely wanted to help the Chinese people have access to the world’s information, they would run Tor servers on Google data centers and help make censorship and tracking a technological impossibility. Even completely avoiding compromise with the Chinese and just doing nothing at all would help, given that the Chinese economy would eventually find the burdens of censorship restrictive to growth and start to exert pressure on those shackles.

Google’s argument that their search engine is really a trojan horse of political progress is a joke. The Chinese government is not stupid, they know that they can use their control of the Internet as a powerful tool to root out threats to their power and keep the general populace misinformed and in the dark.

But it’s hardly a new conflict. Everything from trans fat, seatbelts, cigarettes, ‘creative accounting’, child-labor, sweatshops, to pollution or tire safety presents ethical challenges to companies seeking profit and market dominance. And as these companies break ethical boundaries, they begin to lie and spin to mitigate and avoid the public consequences of their decisions.

Here’s hoping that as with these other issues, raised awareness will eventually stop US corporations like Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Yahoo from conspiring with tyrants to steal human rights from a billion people. And maybe companies with smart people will realize that lying, covering up or spinning the truth eventually hurts the brand and the bottom line, and sometimes drives companies out of business.