{"id":210281,"date":"2010-01-21T09:15:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5587346.post-4435694435208357071"},"modified":"2010-01-22T01:01:55","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T06:01:55","slug":"google-trouble-blogger-and-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/210281","title":{"rendered":"Google trouble: Blogger and Search"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google\u2019s getting a lot of flack for a less than spectacular launch of the gPhone (Nexus One). I\u2019m not too worried about that, I think they\u2019ll get it working. I\u2019m also still optimistic about the Chrome OS netbook \u2013 though if it costs over $200 I\u2019ve got yet another public mea culpa waiting.<\/p>\n<p>On the other tentacle, I am getting bad feelings about two Google services I have long relied on \u2013 Search and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Blogger_(service)\">Blogger<\/a>. I think the problems may be related.<\/p>\n<p>Blogger is the proverbial <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Animal_sentinels\">coal mine canary<\/a>. It is clearly not thriving. There\u2019s still no iPhone or DROID app for posting or editing, there\u2019s an undocumented and unfixed 5000 post limit, there\u2019s no mobile-optimized version of blog pages, the BlogThis bookmarklet was never updated to support categories, the rich text editor has many longstanding bugs, there\u2019s no spam detection on comments, the <a href=\"http:\/\/bloggerindraft.blogspot.com\/\">Blogger in Draft blog<\/a> was silent from Nov 28 through Jan 20 (yesterday!) and so on.<\/p>\n<p>Why isn\u2019t Google investing in Blogger? My best guess would be some mix of<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Inability to manage Blogger spam blogs (splogs)<\/li>\n<li>High success rate of search index poisoning comment spam<\/li>\n<li>High rate of click fraud related to Blog associated adwords<\/li>\n<li>Low rate of revenue from Blogger adwords<\/li>\n<li>Declining readership numbers<\/li>\n<li>Failure of the confusing \u201cFollower\u201d and Google Reader note\/comment programs<\/li>\n<li>Confusion from the rise of Twitter (confuses me too) and Facebook<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Several items on my speculative list implicate search index poisoning problems. These \u201cSearch engine optimization\u201d scams degrade search results, which leads to a spiral of click fraud and declining ad word revenue.<\/p>\n<p>Which brings me to the bigger Google problem. The quality of the search results is deteriorating. On technical topics that I search on, I\u2019m getting a large number of junk web sites. I have to use my Google custom searches to find good results. When I search on hard-to-find answers that I know I\u2019ve addressed in <a href=\"http:\/\/tech.kateva.org\/\">my own ad-free tech blog<\/a>, I don\u2019t get any useful hits at all. It\u2019s not just that I don\u2019t find my marvelous stuff \u2013 I don\u2019t find any answers anywhere.<\/p>\n<p>In several instances, Bing has done better. In particular, Bing seems to find fewer splogs and fraudulent ad-heavy pages \u2013 perhaps because the scummy SEO gang is still optimizing for Google. (Bing\u2019s time will come.)<\/p>\n<p>Google is only as good as their search engine, and that engine is under relentless attack from the same emergent attacks that killed usenet and severely wounded email.  At the moment, the parasites are winning \u2013 and threatening to kill their current host.<\/p>\n<p>Google needs a winning response. They\u2019ve got bigger problems than lousy phone service.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update 1\/21\/10<\/b>: See comments for a response from one of Bloggers Product Managers, it&#8217;s an encouraging rebuttal. Per that comment I corrected the name of the Blogger in Draft blog; the official Blogger blog is <span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 22px; \"><a href=\"http:\/\/buzz.blogger.com\">http:\/\/buzz.blogger.com<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img width='1' height='1' src='https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/5587346-4435694435208357071?l=notes.kateva.org' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google\u2019s getting a lot of flack for a less than spectacular launch of the gPhone (Nexus One). I\u2019m not too worried about that, I think they\u2019ll get it working. I\u2019m also still optimistic about the Chrome OS netbook \u2013 though if it costs over $200 I\u2019ve got yet another public mea culpa waiting. On the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":711,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/711"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}