Code/Decode

Narain is the founder & CEO for 360 Degree Interactive, a web services firm based in Chennai, India. This blog is about his personal views on Web 2.0, RoR, Social networking,Digital media, interactive advertising, SaaS, Service Oriented Architecture, India Inc, rural education, Web standards, mobile 2.0 and more.

Tuesday, March 14

25 Things Danny hate about Google

Over there at Search Engine Watch Danny Sullivan, one of the world's renowned Search Engine expert lists out the 25 things, he hates about Google. I was once a google affectionado and my choice today moved now more with Yahoo!. In this article, i like some of the points he highlights with the problems of Google. My favourites are below

1. Web search counts that make no sense. Why do search engines lie? has Robert Scoble recently poking at this, on how the reported counts don't always match reality. Heck, try class two contributions with "about" 59,800,000 matches. But then you find that only 879 are considered non-duplicates! Meanwhile, mars landing sites gives 1,050,000 matches while
mars landing sites earth
gives nearly double that amount, 1,840,000 listings. It shouldn't. Adding that extra word should give you a subset of the original query. It should come back with less results, not more. I know, I know. It's a bug, or search counts are hard to do, or they do say "about." I know, they aren't the only ones, nor have they been the first (see
Questioning Google's Counts, Danny & Tristan Talk About Link Counts, Site Counts & Index Auditing and Who's The Biggest Of Them All?). Long experience in knowing the counts don't add up has perhaps left me numb to the issue. And goodness knows, I don't want a return to page counts on the home page. But then again, if you are going to put out a number, perhaps it should be accurate?

7. RSS feed for web search. OK, I know the results don't change much, and I know that RSS feeds of web search that Yahoo and MSN are hardly winning over mass numbers of users. Still, why not? Since you offer RSS for news search results and other things, let me monitor web search the same way.

19. Let Gmail display more than 100 items. After archiving 50,000 messages 100 items at a time, I really wished for the ability to view more than 100 items per page. I still want that when I'm having to review about 300 spam items per day. This can't be that hard. Can't we have it?

22. Stop opening products to everyone, then getting overwhelmed. The story is getting tiring. Everyone's invited to use Google Web Accelerator, then you pull it down. Come get Google Analytics, then you shut it down to newcomers to demand. Come get Google Page Creator, then it closes (Missed out? Just go use Yahoo GeoCities). You know whatever you roll out is going to get overwhelmed. Figure out another way to open it up. The demand is no longer making it seem like your products are hot. I was in an Apple store the other day with a huge line. It's making it seem like you are lame and can't anticipate or handle the rush.

23. Charge for things! Seriously, I'm getting frightened. I love that anyone can get free analytics, email, you name it from you. But I'm fearful that people also can't get support for when things go wrong. I think this guy's still trying to get an official response on what happened to his lost Gmail account. Meanwhile, I worry that companies I want competing with you, to keep you on your toes, can't do so when you use advertising to underwrite everything. It just feels anti-competitive. Plus, aren't you kind of sick of shoving ads at us everywhere? Don't I have enough ads on the floor of my supermarket already? Can't part of Google's mission be to help reduce advertising in places where I don't need it?

Read the full article for an insightful view into Google's issues.

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