All posts tagged google

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So Much For “Don’t Be Evil”

By on February 29, 2012 in Browsers, Business, Google, News, privacy, Search, Tutorials & Explanations with 2 Comments

If you haven’t heard, Google is updating their privacy policy.  You have until March 1st to clear out your previous browser history before all bets are off and they own it.  Forever.

I’m not talking about your local browser cache on your computer.  I’m talking about Google’s massive database of browsing history.  Because, they’ve been tracking everything you do and saving it for a rainy day.  It’s time to break out your galoshes.

In a highly controversial move, Google announced that it’s changing it’s privacy policy to allow it to collect, store and use your personal search history data for its own purposes.  And it’s extending that policy to cover the entirety of the search history it has already been collecting.  It plans to leverage this information across all of it’s properties (e.g. YouTube, GMail etc.) and not just on the Google search engine itself.

This data will not be held anonymously – it will now be tied directly back to you.  In perpetuity.  The things that you do anonymously today will, in the future, be directly associated with your name, email address and/or phone number.   For example, private details sent in email can crop up later in Google Maps searches.  Imagine an off-color video viewed on YouTube informing your search results a week later at a client meeting when trying to demo an unrelated business application.

You can turn this off (opt out) and pause Google from continuing to collect your private browsing history.  Follow these steps:

1. Go to Google.com and log into your Google Account.

2. Next, go to  https://www.google.com/history

3. Click “Remove all Web History”

4. Click OK

 

Doing this will not only clear out your browser history, but it will automatically “pause” Google from collecting and storing your history over the long term.  To be clear, they will still collect record of your actions, but it will be anonymized and not tied back to you personally, but just used in aggregate with other users to inform general trends and analytics.

Years ago when I heard Google touting their mantra as “Don’t Be Evil” I thought it was cute and clever, and I was hopeful.  But I was also extremely cynical.  I knew that if they grew enough, the day would eventually come when the growth slows, competition heats up, the suits take over, and pressure to perform (financially) starts to mount.  These things have a way of changing.

To mix metaphors, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  So much for “Don’t Be Evil.”

 

Google Analytics Is Impressive

By on April 7, 2011 in Google, Marketing, Opinion, Productivity, Search, SEM, SEO, Tutorials & Explanations with No Comments

Since the early days of the web, reviewing web traffic reports has been incredibly important to anyone with an online presence.

“Back in the day,” as they say, I used to own and operate Screensaver.com, which I started from ground zero and grew to be the #1 most popular screensaver download site in the world.  And back in 90′s and early 2000′s that was saying a lot, because screensavers were the single most popular category of download online after games.  We were serving 10 million page views monthly back when that was crazy huge traffic.  (It’s still not too shabby, but the total audience was orders of magnitude smaller back then).   And traffic stats were crucial to that success.

By analyzing where traffic was coming from and what keywords were being used, we could work on increasing our traffic by better targetting our keywords and focusing efforts on the best sources of traffic.  And by reviewing the most (and least) popular pages, paths through the site, and more, we were able to optimize content and make adjustments to maximize visitor experience, and more.  Sort of like…  the things we still do today.  (I suppose it’s nice to know that some things don’t change!)

Without web analytics we’re all just guessing and flailing in the dark.  But put metrics to the traffic, and magic happens!

Back in the early days of the web, this was achieved by installing software that would parse through web server log files and keep track of and tally a bazillion different variables, numbers, counters, IP addresses, users and statical points, in order to derive meaning from the seemingly endless reams of data.   Personally, I used the “Grandaddy” of reporting tools:  Web Trends.

But said Grandaddy came at a premium.   Over time other competitors emerged that were every bit as capable, but less costly, and I’ve tried most of them at one time or another.

I remember some entirely web-based reporting systems trying to gain traction as far back as 1996.  But they were fraught with many problems and issues.  And mainly, I didn’t trust them.   Even Web Trends jumped into the scene with “Web Trends Live”.  Sure, it was cool in theory, but I refused to put their advertising badges on my web site (I’m running a professional site, not a stock car racer with various sponor logos splashed everywhere).  And right off the bat there were latency problems — nothing like waiting and waiting for pages to finish loading, just to realize it’s the reporting software slowing it down!  Speed and connectivity issues also contributed to missed reporting, and what good is reporting metrics if they’re wrong?!   So went the concept of real-time reporting.  Neat in concept, but not robust enough.  A concept before its time.

Now mind you, Google Analytics has been out for a while.  This isn’t “news.”  I gave it a quick look at first, but it was pretty basic and I was still dubious from earlier experiences.

About two years ago I gave another hard look to Google Analytics and decided to dip my toe into the water and give it a test.  It went well.  I gravitated towards using it more and more.   Today, I no longer run reporting software on any of my web servers — all of my reporting is driven by Google Analytics.

Over time, Google has managed to solve the major issues that bothered me.  Due to their sheer volume and wealth, they’ve been able to plow hundreds of millions of dollars per year into their software and hardware infrastructure.   They spend tens of millions of dollars per year just focused on improving speed and reducing latency, building scale and deploying physical redundancy among its servers, data centers and networking infrastructure.   Just retrieving search results from the entire web universe instantly when you hit <ENTER> wasn’t good enough — now they predict what you want and pull results in real time as you are still typing it!

This level of speed, efficiency and connectedness has been brought to bear with Google Analytics.   Oh, and like its namesake search engine, it’s free.

Signup at www.google.com/analytics and you’re off and running in minutes.  You can enter as many different web sites as you want to track, all under your one login, and you can even invite other people to have access to your stats on a site by site (i.e. case by case) basis, such as bringing in other members of your team, or your web master, etc.  Reporting is real-time, with nothing to install or maintain.  And it’s a piece of cake to get up and running.   In about 60 seconds you can create an account, setup a site to track and get the code swatch you need to paste into your web site pages (or to send to your webmaster to do it for you).  And BAM!  You’re off and running.

The toolset has really matured over the years.  Google continues to integrate new features and enhance and expand the existing ones.  It’s incredibly feature rich! When I casually mentioned it to one of my customers recently, he looked at me like I had two heads.  He had never heard of it.  So I thought it was time to share some details here.

When you login (after everything is all set up), you start off at a Dashboard that gives you the broad strokes.  This is great for top-level Executive Management and to just quickly put a finger on the pulse.  But then you can start drilling down deeper, and deeper, and deeper, as you wish.  And if you are involved in buying AdWords, you can integrate your AdWords campaigns and track the entire process from end to end. You can view the entire process from its origins at Google search to click-through to your site and through to purchase and checkout! Google Analytics will generate reports on ROI metrics and more.   It’s quite impressive.    And of course, it’s 100% web-based so you can log in and review reports from anywhere on the Internet, at any time.

Did I mention it’s 100% free?

I wish WebTrends luck.  I think they’re going to need it.

In the meantime, do yourself a favor and check out Google Analytics if you haven’t already.  You’ll be glad that you did.

 

NOTE From the Editor: This was just a general opinion piece on Google Analytics.  I’m currently drafting a detailed article about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which will delve deeper into these disciplines, and be a lot more “educational”.  Stay tuned!

 

 

Google Announces Nexus|S

By on December 6, 2010 in android, Cell Service, Google, News, Opinion, Phones, Smartphones with No Comments

Wow.  I did NOT see that one coming!   Google just announced a new handset…

Anyone who read my prior article back on August 6th (“Should Google Stick to Search?“) will remember that I was not surprised that Google let the NexusOne die a quiet death — it was a bad move for Google to get into hardware handsets in the first place, putting them into square competition with their supposed “partners”, etc.   It sold poorly, and there were better handsets available from Google’s partners (HTC, Motorola etc.).   I thought giving up on the NexusOne was a smart move in the wake of a bad one.   Then this.

I am completely befuddled.  Was this the plan the entire time?  Who gives up on a device when another is already in the wings?  No, you keep pushing and promoting and building marketshare and you heavily tout that the next version is coming.  Witness the iPhone 4 “Antennaegate”.   Apple worked to address the issue best as they could, giving rubber bumpers for free until modified, slipstreamed versions of the hardware with tweaks could reach shelves, etc.  And in the meantime they’re already heavily into iPhone 5 development.   Who drops a major new product (first of its kind for Google), leaves a half-year void, then announces a follow-up?   This is very bizarre.

I cannot help wonder if this was on purpose, or if Google back-tracked on their backtrack after the fact?

I have no opinions at this point, merely awe and confusion.  This will be interesting to watch unfold!

UPDATE: More of the details are coming out now.  This phone was developed in conjunction with Samsung and is being bundled specifically and only with T-Mobil and sold via exactly one retail location: Best Buy.   So this is a completely different approach than Google took with the NexusOne where they tried to sidestep everyone and sell direct and produce their own brand of phone.  They obviously are stepping up their animosity with Apple and are taking every shot that they can between the phone and the new Google Bookstore that was announced today as well.  It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out over the next year or so.  I think consumers win regardless.  The only real loser will be Amazon on the bookstore side.

Should Google Stick to Search?

By on August 6, 2010 in Business, Google, Opinion, Software with 2 Comments

Well, today I saw an interesting blog post quietly slide by, almost unnoticed.  Google waved “Bye, Bye” to Google Wave.

This comes fairly close on the heels of another similar non-announcement: Google quietly killed its heralded Nexus One smartphone.

These two back-to-back dismal outings brought to mind a bevy of other non-starters by Google as well, such as the Orkut social network,  GoogleTalk (while Skype, AIM and Yahoo! IM flourish, does anyone actually use GoogleTalk as their primary IM software?  I certainly don’t know anyone who does), the municipal WiFi projects, and so forth.

I have somewhat mixed feelings on this.  On the one hand, I do understand the desire to “extend the brand” and get into other related markets.  Certainly Apple has done well with it’s iPod line of MP3 players.  They created a device that integrates well with its line of personal computer hardware and software for a seemless experience and now, years later, it’s a major bohemoth in the music industry.  Mp3 Players begat phones with iPods integrated, and so forth.  And it all works together as a single ecosystem to drive the popularity of its core computing business.  Indeed, Apple has seen it’s PC market share skyrocket in recent years as a result.  It’s the old “…as the pond rises, so do all boats” concept that I personally believe in very strongly.

However, extending the brand into related areas is one thing.  Jumping feet-first into entirely new areas that are NOT related to one’s core competencies is a whole other thing.

Google’s introduction of GMail made sense to me.  At it’s core, it’s related to search.  They didn’t necessarily pioneer anything revolutionary — web based email (and free at that) had existed for nearly 10 years before.  Witness Hotmail.    But they added AJAX-y goodness, made storage virtually unlimited, and then integrated their Google Search magic to make searching, sorting and finding stuff in your massive inbox very fast, easy and intuitive.  And that made sense.   Creating cell phone hardware?  Not so much.

Before all the Android fans start harping on me, I must note parenthetically that I “got” the concept of Android as a Google project.  It’s Google’s attempt to extend its brand to mobile platforms and lock itself in as the provider of choice for search on mobile platforms.  I get that.  (And by the way — it’s not like Google “created” Android from the ground up in quite the way neophytes might think.  It’s an open source, Linux-based OS that they polished and retrofitted to a mobile OS, much like making a new, customized Linux distribution).  But the leap to hardware and online stores, etc. is a whole other thing.

So on the one hand, Google has pioneered some newer technologies, brought awareness and popularity to certain methodologies (eg. AJAX), and has raised the bar for the rest of the tech industry.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing that a massively profitable, multi-billion dollar corporation is willing to throw money at R&D just to “see what happens”, with results going to the benefit of the likes of you and me.  [Click here to see a longer laundry list of their "Google Labs" products and technologies.]

However, from a business perspective, I can’t help but feel that Google should be sticking to its core competency (i.e. Search), then radiate out from there.  All of these wild ventures into completely new and unrelated territories is a bit scattered.  Up until now, Google was able to manage its reputation pretty well and these side projects were more like individual employee’s little pet projects and R&D stuff, and released into the wild for the rest of us to toy with and experiment.    But in the past year or two Google has really gotten behind some of these projects in a huge, huge way and trumpeted them as the next coming.   And they’ve taken quite a few hits.   While they are the 800lb Gorilla in search, they’re starting to loose credibility with their new ventures.

I haven’t even mentioned their “Project 10^100″ that they launched a few YEARS ago, in 2008.  Winners were supposed to be announced in 2009.  Then January 2010.  It’s now August of 2010 and they’re still soliciting proposals, have removed all deadline promises, and have simply listed future announcements as “coming soon.”   Another big PR hype that slowly rotted on the vine and died.

I’m not here to be a naysayer or beat up on Google.  I use Google.  I love Google.  I use Google Analytics for many of the web sites we design and develop for our customers at 401 Consulting, LLC.  I hope Google does well and is around for a very, very long time.  I’m just stepping back, as a business owner and tech industry CEO, and musing on the concept of sticking to one’s core competency.   I think it might do Google some good.

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Should Google Stick to Search?

By on August 6, 2010 in Google, Opinion, Search with No Comments

Well, today I saw an interesting blog post quietly slide by, almost unnoticed.  Google waved “Bye, Bye” to Google Wave.

This comes fairly close on the heels of another similar non-announcement: Google quietly killed its heralded Nexus One smartphone.

These two back-to-back dismal outings brought to mind a bevy of other non-starters by Google as well, such as the Orkut social network,  GoogleTalk (while Skype, AIM and Yahoo! IM flourish, does anyone actually use GoogleTalk as their primary IM software?  I certainly don’t know anyone who does), the municipal WiFi projects, and so forth.

I have somewhat mixed feelings on this.  On the one hand, I do understand the desire to “extend the brand” and get into other related markets.  Certainly Apple has done well with it’s iPod line of MP3 players.  They created a device that integrates well with its line of personal computer hardware and software for a seemless experience and now, years later, it’s a major bohemoth in the music industry.  Mp3 Players begat phones with iPods integrated, and so forth.  And it all works together as a single ecosystem to drive the popularity of its core computing business.  Indeed, Apple has seen it’s PC market share skyrocket in recent years as a result.  It’s the old “…as the pond rises, so do all boats” concept that I personally believe in very strongly.

However, extending the brand into related areas is one thing.  Jumping feet-first into entirely new areas that are NOT related to one’s core competencies is a whole other thing.

Google’s introduction of GMail made sense to me.  At it’s core, it’s related to search.  They didn’t necessarily pioneer anything revolutionary — web based email (and free at that) had existed for nearly 10 years before.  Witness Hotmail.    But they added AJAX-y goodness, made storage virtually unlimited, and then integrated their Google Search magic to make searching, sorting and finding stuff in your massive inbox very fast, easy and intuitive.  And that made sense.   Creating cell phone hardware?  Not so much.

Before all the Android fans start harping on me, I must note parenthetically that I “got” the concept of Android as a Google project.  It’s Google’s attempt to extend its brand to mobile platforms and lock itself in as the provider of choice for search on mobile platforms.  I get that.  (And by the way — it’s not like Google “created” Android from the ground up in quite the way neophytes might think.  It’s an open source, Linux-based OS that they polished and retrofitted to a mobile OS, much like making a new, customized Linux distribution).  But the leap to hardware and online stores, etc. is a whole other thing.

So on the one hand, Google has pioneered some newer technologies, brought awareness and popularity to certain methodologies (eg. AJAX), and has raised the bar for the rest of the tech industry.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing that a massively profitable, multi-billion dollar corporation is willing to throw money at R&D just to “see what happens”, with results going to the benefit of the likes of you and me.  [Click here to see a longer laundry list of their "Google Labs" products and technologies.]

However, from a business perspective, I can’t help but feel that Google should be sticking to its core competency (i.e. Search), then radiate out from there.  All of these wild ventures into completely new and unrelated territories is a bit scattered.  Up until now, Google was able to manage its reputation pretty well and these side projects were more like individual employee’s little pet projects and R&D stuff, and released into the wild for the rest of us to toy with and experiment.    But in the past year or two Google has really gotten behind some of these projects in a huge, huge way and trumpeted them as the next coming.   And they’ve taken quite a few hits.   While they are the 800lb Gorilla in search, they’re starting to loose credibility with their new ventures.

I haven’t even mentioned their “Project 10^100″ that they launched a few YEARS ago, in 2008.  Winners were supposed to be announced in 2009.  Then January 2010.  It’s now August of 2010 and they’re still soliciting proposals, have removed all deadline promises, and have simply listed future announcements as “coming soon.”   Another big PR hype that slowly rotted on the vine and died.

I’m not here to be a naysayer or beat up on Google.  I use Google.  I love Google.  I use Google Analytics for many of the web sites we design and develop for our customers at 401 Consulting, LLC.  I hope Google does well and is around for a very, very long time.  I’m just stepping back, as a business owner and tech industry CEO, and musing on the concept of sticking to one’s core competency.   I think it might do Google some good.

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