This is amazing to me, not because it is true but because it is co clearly demonstrated with recorded phone calls. Although I fully expect Google to issue excuses, blame an incompetent vendor, and allude to “beta”, “experiment”, or “brief period of impact..effecting 0.0001% of businesses” maybe this will be the living example the world needs to recognize Google’s intent. After all, through its seo management campaigns, Google taught us all that intent, not actual practice, should often be the cause of scorn and punishment.

Mike Blumenthal brought us the story of a US business that was de-listed by Google local, ostensibly because it did not pass the trust tests for being a truly local business. The reality is quite shocking (but quite clear in the audio recordings of the phone calls) - Google will trust cheap, incompetent, unverified offshore call center representatives over local small businesses.

In this case, it seems a poorly-trained, culturally insensitive and communications-challenged call center in India was given the power to de-list local businesses if they determined — without any apparent oversight — that the business did not have a local physical presence at the address on record.

I repeat - Google trusts it’s obviously low cost outsourced vendor more than it trusts established, US-based local businesses.
I fully expect the usual “it wasn’t our fault”, “it’s a new program only in beta”, and “blame the vendor” excuses from uber-arrogant Google. But the fact remains, we can clearly see Google’s intent with this activity. Google will trust an entity that has a commercial relationship with Google (even if a low-bid one, from overseas) before it trusts those whom it already arrogantly believes is “out to get them”.

Google’s paranoia and arrogance are hurting the US economy. How can this be ignored?

My advice to Google: reach out to that other money-hungry arrogant big entity known as the Chamber of Commerce, and make a deal while you can. They have an edge with small businesses, have demonstrated that they, too will bend all sorts of ways if it means cash for their pockets. You will need that public impression of an alliance with small businesses sooner than you suspect.

My advice to small businesses: start calling your Chamber of Commerce and COMPLAIN LOUDLY about Google. Today. Demand action. You have few other options, and the opportunity for you to have any impact in this conversation is going away in 5…4…3….2….

Happens all the time… tourists come into my temperate rain forest and admire the trees, while missing the forest. Yes, trees are cool. But not nearly as cool as the ecosystem that supports them.

Same thing with Google. SEOs see the trees, but many are missing the whole forest idea.

Riddle me this — if you have to pee while hiking on a forest trail, where should you deposit your unwanted bodily fluids? The answer might surprise you: right on the trail. Not off in the bushes (you’ll trample a lot of ecosystem doing that) and not behind a tree (the forest-floor-rises-up-to-base-of-tree region is a very important part of the system). Pee right on the trail. Why?

Note that the trail is already trampled.. it’s called a trail for a reason. Also note that forest animals (like deer) have an often desperate need for salt. They WILL find yours, and they WILL lick it up, from where ever you left it.  If that requires scratching up the forest floor because your latent Puritanism forced you to blaze a new trail into the brush just to avoid being seen executing the same basic human functions that everyone must execute every 3 hours or so, your how-to-pee-while-hiking tactics are doing more harm than good.

A naturalist will tell you that peeing on the trail “gives” the salt, water, and other ingredients to those who need it, without any additional trampling costs to the forest. Same naturalist will note that forest trails should be serene and quiet and low-traffic, so there really shouldn’t be any discretion problem. Same naturalist will also quickly note that a trail can’t support a hundred cidiots (city+idiot) per day peeing on it, and that people who don’t get nature should limit their nature walks to well established trails designed for high levels of foot traffic (typically accompanied by porta-potties or restrooms). Said naturalist may also comment on the sterile nature of healthy pee, and the unhealthy state of most Big Mac loving city slickers visiting the Great Outdoors with their air-conditioned SUVs. Said naturalist also probably hikes in the nude, but that’s another story.

In the forest, the bigger eco system will over ride your silly rules, because your rules don’t matter for survival of the system. Your rules matter TO YOU. And that’s where the damage comes from… you only see the trees, and end up destroying the forest that supported the trees.

I’m going to say most SEOs only see trees… links, articles, attention, audience - but miss the forest, which is the ecosystem of the web of connected surfers. Most SEOs are more like Google than nature. They do what they perceive is best for themselves, or the cabal they collaborate with, and harm the ecosystem in the process.

Lately, they are dooming themselves, too, because Google’s got a plan and it doesn’t include them. As they diligently pay attention to the Google Trees (do this, don’t do that) they are ignoring the bigger forest… Google’s execution of a plan to benefit Google at the expense of the natural web.

How many times have you heard “you might have to start over” in the past 6 months? Imagine that… a suggestion that, in order to be trusted and receive search traffic from Google, you might have to abandon your domain and start over on a new one.

Seriously? A traffic broker who already successfully copies and re-purposes your content while capriciously representing you in unilaterally-edited fashion, now has the cajones to tell you to abandon your one owned asset (the domain) or lose the traffic?

Think of the forest.. the bigger picture. Does Google like that you own a domain that has brand power? Does Google like that people can “find” you without searching for you in Google’s index? Does Google like that you can choose how and what to publish on your site? Does Google like that your seemingly-wanton formatting of what you publish makes it difficult if not impossible for Google to”organize” into an efficient, searchable index?

A domain name is a handle used by the market to hold on to you. Your potential (which they acknowledge, by remembering you as a brand) is invested into your domain name. Google wants that now.

The same way the middle-school bully swings by to take your lunch money, because he can and you don’t resist, Google’s taking away your forest, one tree at a time. And many, many of you so-called SEO people out there are helping Google destroy the same ecosystem that supports you.

Google doesn’t own the web. Despite Google’s stifling of innovation for the past 5 years or so, you can still innovate if you just resist the imposing, selfish rule sets that claim to be good for everyone but are actually destroying the ecosystem. You don’t have to conform, in order to succeed on the web.

As you build websites and draw audiences, you are participating in a dynamic living ecosystem. If you find yourself on the heavily-trafficked urban trail, by all means use the facilities that have been provided for you. It’s the civil thing to do, for everyone’s sake. But if you’re innovating, and like the naturalist working to understand the interconnected web and helping it thrive, sometimes the best thing to do is pee on the trail.

Oh Google how you’ve changed. As with every change, you seem to become less fun.

Those who were there using the web when Google launched, will probably remember how much fun it was to discover things with Google. The single, biggest amazement by my recollection? That I could enter any specific text string, and Google would return the exact URLs where it appeared. Wow. Indexing what seemed like the entire World Wide Web. Amazing! Check this out… (search)… and this! (search) and on and on. I had no idea those things were out there, and they were wicked cool, and I was thrilled to have discovered them. I made my day… sunnier.

When I needed to “find” something I didn’t know existed, I used my creativity - I crafted a query I suspected might return something close to what I suspected was out there… and it worked!

Google was awesome.

These days, after many years of Google becoming more and more like my ornery, overly disciplined and strict grandfather, the experience searching with Google is almost the opposite of what it was. Every query is now a battle, and nearly every result set is a disappointment. That might not be fair to say, because not every result set is inadequate. But, using Google is certainly not fun, and therein lies some disappointment. Google is no longer a discovery tool. It is much closer to a directory than ever before, and a biased, incomplete directory at that. As Gigaom said in it’s article about Pinterest and Pinterest look-a-likes, search is a task, and discovery is fun.

Search is changing, and Google is a big reason. I don’t think Pinterest is any more amazing than Google image search or Bing image search can be. Unfortunately, Google and Bing don’t do image search very well. The reason seems to be one of control — these “search engines” seem to want to control us in ways that make them money, instead of allowing us to engage with their tools in ways that make us happy.

That “seem” is a reflection of the emotion one feels when using Google or Bing image search, vs. visual discovery tools like Pinterest.  And that’s the “fail” — that is where Google and other search engines miss the market. Pinterest is so simple, and not much of an innovation. It’s done what Facebook and Google and Bing could have easily done, had they the freedom to deliver what is easy, cool, fun, interesting, etc. But those organizations instead project a sense of technical seriousness instead. They are in a battle, and we users can sense it. Overly gruff, overly concerned with things “we don’t understand”, and so overly-focused on some endpoint beyond our immediate desires that it gets in the way.

Looking for an image to inspire your blog post? What were the odds that you would hit Google image search for inspiration a year ago? Have you tried Pinterest? If you have, what are the odds today, that you’ll engage with Pinterest first, before going to Google or Bing image search? Seems like nothing but upside for Pinterest.

Sadly, engineers don’t recognize today’s “search” challenge as anything beyond social graphs, vote flags, or  races to comprehensiveness or correctness or any combination of weighting factors probabilistically certain to define “the best”. And that’s probably the biggest “fail” of all. Just as Apple knew mediocre design would fail to sell an excellent product into a crowded marketplace, Google’s technocrats fail to recognize that its customers are sloppy, messy, emotional, tired, and often anxious humans. Of course a handful of every hundred American consumers work hard and care about correctness and utility and “the right way” to do things. Everybody else? Well, let’s just say technically-correct and “safe”, boring, search isn’t very satisfying.

Search is a task, previously reserved for librarians and statisticians. Increasingly, it is returning to that status, encouraged by Google and the others. Discovery? It’s still a wide open field.