Tag: search

Google bets on artificial intelligence

Google bets on artificial intelligence and machine learning as the company deals with the shift to mobile

Breaking with the company’s tradition of the Sergi, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai writes this year’s founders letter laying out how the search engine giant is focusing of artificial intelligence and the machine learning.

Pichai’s view of the world seems to tie in very closely with founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin with him laying out a vision of making the internet and computers accessible to all.

The challenge for Google is the shift away from personal computers, something that the company is struggling with and a factor that Pichai acknowledges.

Today’s proliferation of “screens” goes well beyond phones, desktops, and tablets. Already, there are exciting developments as screens extend to your car, like Android Auto, or your wrist, like Android Wear. Virtual reality is also showing incredible promise—Google Cardboard has introduced more than 5 million people to the incredible, immersive and educational possibilities of VR.

Whether Google can execute on that vision and manages to diversify its revenues away from depending almost exclusively upon web advertising will be what defines Pichai’s time as the company’s CEO. He has a challenging task ahead.

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Google’s Missed Revolution

Google may pay a high price for the failure of its social media platform

The slow demise of Google Plus has been painful to watch as the service is slowly wound back ahead of its inevitable quiet burial.

Mashable’s Seth Fiegerman has a deep look at what went wrong for Google’s nascent social media platform.

Adding to the company’s distress, early Google+ adopter and advocate Thomas Hawk posted on Facebook his requiem for the service citing how the organisation seemed to lose interest in the product and the departure of Vic Gundotra sealed its fate.

Google’s Corporate ADD

Hawk is particularly scathing about Google’s prospects of being trusted again by developers and the marketplace. “By quitting early, Google lost what little goodwill they might have to seed something in the future,” he says. “Who will ever take Google serious with social again?”

Once again we see the effects of Google’s corporate Attention Deficit Disorder and the message to developers and evangelists is clear – be very careful in devoting too many resources to any new product from the company.

Google Plus’ decline though signals something far more serious for the company however – it may well have missed some of the most serious shifts in its marketplace.

The SoLoMo opportunity

Four years ago when the service was launched with great fanfare SoLoMo was one of the key buzzwords and it was understandable for Google to want a slice of it. Unfortunately the company found that even an business as big as Google can’t force change by management diktat.

SoLoMo – Social, Local and Mobile – were seen as the big market growth areas and Google’s footprint in all of those spaces was poor. Although Google Places was leading the local search market at the time.

Google+ was intended to solve at least the social problem with the added advantage of overlaying personal information onto the already comprehensive ‘knowledge graph’ it’s gathered on users.

Four years later it’s clear Google Plus is a failure and much of that is due to the project being driven from the top down. From its launch the project was about meeting management imperatives and it’s notable in the company’s announcements about the service how little mention users get.

Google’s price of failure

The problem now for Google is they have wasted four years on the failed product at a time when Facebook have become the dominant social media platform and have successfully adapted the service to the mobile world.

Even in Local search, Facebook are making strong inroads into local business advertising, an area Google had the advantage by tying together maps and local search but lost because of inaction and bureaucracy.

A costly distraction

The Google+ distraction means the company has missed the entire SoLoMo opportunity and squandered the one area where they had a massive head start.

Google now face a future where their key advantage is stranded on the desktop without serious integration into social media. At the same time their ambitions to run a payments service seems stalled as well.

Whether Google+ turns out to be as strategic a mistake for the search engine giant as Windows Vista was for Microsoft remains to be seen but the similarity between the two companies stuck with declining desktop based business models in a world of mobile consumers is striking.

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Facebook’s and Google’s enlightened self interest

Facebook and Google both put their users first in their latest updates. It’s something other business should consider.

Over the last few weeks much has been written about Google’s mobile search update that went live on Wednesday, some said it would be the death of small business on the internet while others claimed it would be the end of corporates online.

While all the focus has been on Google’s search changes Facebook quietly made a change that will probably be more vexing for many businesses.

Both Facebook and Google are struggling with making their services more useful for users, with the Google changes the intention is to make search on mobile devices more useful in giving preference to websites that work on smaller screens.

In a post on Google’s webmaster blog, Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye answered the basic questions about the search engine changes which dispelled much of the hysteria and myths about the update. The main point of Ohye’s post is that Google want to show users useful information.

Facebook have a similar problem, they have to balance the often competing interests of their users and advertisers with the main aim being keeping visitors on their site for as long as possible.

The objective of keeping users engaged is the reason for a series of tweaks Facebook announced this week that change the newsfeed visitors see.

The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you. This means we need to give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and community organizations you are connected to. This balance is different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about every day. As more people and pages are sharing more content, we need to keep improving News Feed to get this balance right.

Facebook are putting their users priorities first in making sure the news feed is interesting and relevant, which the company believes will entice visitors to spend longer on the site and make advertising more attractive.

If it works then it’s a win for Facebook, their users and those who pay to advertise on the site. Again though, the losers are the companies and brands not advertising who thought they could get views by the quality of their content.

Unless the content is very good, those companies not paying Facebook are in for more disappointment as their reach collapses even further than its current pathetic rates.

Google’s change too is something that puts users first; rather than dumping mobile web surfers onto an unreadable page, they are making sure people get to sites that are useful.

In many ways Google is only encouraging what has been best practice for at least five years, that every site should work equally well on mobile devices as they do on desktop computers.

What Facebook and Google are showing us is the value of putting users’ needs first. If your guests are happy then your business model has a much better chance of succeeding, regardless of who the eventual customer is.

Making business more user friendly should be a priority for all companies in a competitive world.

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No country for small business

Online advertising for small business is wide open again as the Internet empires focus on big business.

Facebook’s latest changes to its layout creates more problems for small business using social media as the real estate available on its site for eyeballs gets smaller.

The social media giant has been catching criticism recently for changes to its algorithm that make it harder for businesses to be seen online.

In the hospitality industry, discontent was articulated by the Eat 24 website which closed its Facebook Page down after finding the problems too hard.

With the changes to the online advertising feed, it makes it even harder for small business to be seen on the platform as reduced space means higher prices for the space that remains available.

It’s hard to see small businesses getting much traction with the changes when they’re up against big brands with large budgets.

On the other hand for the big brands, the importance of proper targeting becomes even greater as wasting

A challenge for small business

The big problem now for small business is where do you advertise where the customers are?

A decade or so ago, this was a no-brainer – the local service or retail business advertised in the local newspaper or Yellow Pages. Customers went there and, despite their chronic inefficiencies, they worked.

Now with Facebook’s changes, it’s harder for customers to follow small business and this is a particular problem for hospitality where updates are hard.

The failure of Google

Google should have owned this market with Google Places however the service has been neglected as the company folded the business listing service into the Plus social media platform.

Today it’s hard to see where small business is going to achieve organic reach – unpaid appearances in social media and search – or paid reach as the competition with deep pocketed big brands is fierce.

Services like Yelp! were for a while a possible alternative but increasingly the deals they are stitching up deals with companies like Yahoo! and Australia’s Sensis are marginalising small business.

So the online world is getting harder for small business to get their message out onto online channels.

For the moment that’s a problem although it’s an interesting opportunity for an entrepreneur – possibly even a media company – to exploit.

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Demand Media’s closed window of opportunity

Demand media’s downfall offers some hopeful lessons for those who want to see better quality content on the web.

A few years ago content farm Demand Media was being hailed in some quarters as the future of the media industry.

Today its stock is languishing, revenues are falling and any thought that the cheap, low quality writing that Demand Media delivered will be the future of media is laughable.

Variety magazine recently published a feature describing the of the fall of Demand Media  with a focus on how Google’s changes to its search engine algorithm undermined the content farm’s busines model. Variety’s story is an interesting case study on not relying on another company for your business plan and extends the hope that low quality writing is not the future of online media.

Dodgy business

Demand media evolved from the eHow and eNom businesses, both of which relied on dubious – if not downright dishonest – online practices.

eNom was particularly irritating, basically just registering domain names around popular search terms that led to   pages full of advertising that delivered nothing of value to someone searching the web for information on a topic.

It was very profitable for a while though, as Variety reports;

Early on, Demand used eNom’s 1 million generic domain names (such as “3dblurayplayers.com”) to serve up relevant ads to people searching for specific topics. These “domain parking” pages were immensely profitable, generating north of $100,000 per day, according to a former Demand exec who requested anonymity. “That’s $35 million-$40 million per year without doing any work,” the exec said.

The eHow business wasn’t any better, relying on low quality, cheap articles that only worked because they were stuffed full of the keywords that Google would base their search results on.

On January 26 2011 Demand Media went public and the criticism of both the newly listed company and Google became intense.

This story from Business Insider – which ha featured some gushing and dreadful analysis of Demand Media previously – illustrated the problem the company had of being overwhelming dependent on Google, although the writer believed Google were making too much money from content farms to really act against them.

Google’s problem with the content farms was real, the quality of search results was falling and users were finding their pages were full of low value rubbish rather than authoritative sources which opened the search giant’s core business  to disruption from Microsoft’s Bing and other search engines. Something had to be done.

Jason Calacanis, whose Mahalo was a competitor to Demand Media, flagged the risks to content farms in a presentation early in February 2011, “the one rule of working with Google is don’t make them look stupid. If you make ‘The Google’ look stupid, they’ll f- you up.” He said. “eHow makes Google look stupid.”

Eventually Google decided they were sick of looking stupid and changed their algorithms and the rules for getting a page one search result suddenly changed.

Demand Media’s business was doomed from the moment Google made that change, as Variety reports;

By April 2011, third-party measurement services were reporting that the Google changes had reduced traffic to Demand sites by as much as 40%. Demand issued a statement that the reports “significantly overstated the negative impact” of the change, but the stock took a dive — plummeting 38% over two weeks — from which it has not recovered.

As Demand Media was affected, so too was the entire Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry where thousands of consultants found their strategies of placing low quality pages and link rich website comments now damaged their clients’ businesses.

For web surfers, Google’s change was good news as suddenly search results were relevant again.

Demand Media was, in essence, a transition business that prospered during a brief windows of opportunity that quickly closed along with the company’s prospects.

That window of opportunity was also dependent on someone else’s business strategy, which is always a dangerous position to be in.

Demand Media’s lesson is that while there are opportunities to be had in markets that are being disrupted by new technologies, there’s no guarantees those opportunities will last. What works in SEO, digital media or social marketing today may not work tomorrow.

It’s also a hopeful lesson that websites regurgitating low quality content is only a transition phase in the development of online media and that providing good, original writing and video is the best long term strategy for survival on the net.

Should that lesson be true, then it’s good news for both writers and readers.

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A quick Christmas checklist for hospitality businesses

What should cafes, restaurants and hotels do to be found by holiday makers and tourists?

For listeners of my regular spot on ABC Riverland, here’s a quick checklist for regional business owners to make sure their online presence is ready for the Christmas holidays.

Prospective customers are using the web to find businesses and attractions, so taking advantage of the free listing services by the major search engines and directories is the first step.

Google Plus Local

The search engine giant’s local service gives a free business listing that feeds into their results and those of many GPS devices and social media services.

Fill in as many fields as possible, making sure you don’t forget opening hours and payment methods you accept.

You can also upload photos and menus to your Google Local listing, all of these will help you come up higher in the search engine results.

True Local

News Limited’s True Local offers a similar service to Google and this also feeds into various services along with the local news sites run by the newspaper chain.

Again, fill in as many fields as possible and make sure all your essential business details are listed.

Sensis

While the Yellow and White Pages may be dying, a free listing with their site will help come up on the various Telstra sites and companies that partner with them.

Review sites

Eatability, Yelp and Tripadvisor are all popular sites and applications used by customers to research accommodation and venues. You need to grab your listing and check what previous customers have said about you.

Social media

Along with having your own listing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and possibly sites like Pinterest; you should be doing regular searches to check what people are saying about you and your district.

One of the great things about social media is it’s a great market intelligence tool. For instance if there’s lots of people coming to your town to go fishing and there’s nobody catering for them, then this is an opportunity. Google Alerts can help you with this.

Your own website

Most important of all is your own website. Check that it works on smartphones and tablet computers, if necessary borrow a friend’s Android or Apple device and see what your site looks like on it.

When you review this with your web developer also check your keywords are working and make sure yourmeta-tagsall reflect what you have to offer your customers.

The Christmas-New Year rush is too important a period for hospitality business to miss out on customers. A few small thing might get you the visitors who might have kept on driving to the next town.

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Rivers of gold

Can there be a downside to Google’s massive profits?

Google’s announcement that their revenues have increased by 24% over the last year shows the search engine juggernaut keeps rolling on.

It’s tempting to think that Google is untouchable and that’s certainly how it appears when you’re on track to earn forty billion dollars a year and book close to 40% of that income as profits.

On the same day, Sony announced a massive restructure including with 10,000 redundancies and the company’s CEO, Kazuo Hirai, spoke of a sense of urgency to address the once dominant corporation’s drift into irrelevance.

Twenty years the thought of Sony – one of the world’s innovators in consumer electronics – would be wallowing in the wake of companies like Apple and unknown upstarts like Google was unthinkable.

Fortunes are won and quickly lost in a time of great change and this is something we should keep in mind about Google when we look at their rivers of gold.

“Rivers Of Gold” was a term coined to describe the advertising riches of the newspaper industry in the 1980’s. Google’s online advertising is partly responsible for destroying that business.

Today Google is a search engine business that makes its money from the advertising that deserted print media and went online.

It may be that manufacturing mobile phones, running “identity services” disguised as social media platforms or augmented reality spectacles are the future of Google but right now they it’s search and advertising that pays the bills and books the massive profits.

The challenge for Google is not to lose sight of its current core business while building the future rivers of gold.

If Google’s leaders can’t manage this, then they risk following the newspaper industry that they themselves disrupted.

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