> Despite the semi-positive resolution, I was disturbed. If these dime-store scrapers were doing so well and generating so much traffic on the back of our content – how was the rest of the web faring? My enduring faith in the gravitational constant of Google had been shaken. Shaken to the very core. > > Throughout my investigation I had nagging doubts that we were seeing **serious cracks in the algorithmic search foundations of the house that Google built**. But I was afraid to write an article about it for fear I’d be claimed an incompetent kook. I wasn’t comfortable sharing that opinion widely, because we might be doing something obviously wrong. Which we tend to do frequently and often. *Gravity can’t be wrong. We’re just clumsy … right?* > > I can’t help noticing that we’re not the only site to have serious problems with Google search results in the last few months. In fact, the drum beat of deteriorating Google search quality has been practically *deafening* of late: > > - [Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-better-google-2/) > - [Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail](http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/12/dishwashers_dem.html) > - [Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/content_farms_impact.php) > - [On the increasing uselessness of Google](http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-uselessness-of-Google......html) > - [Google, Google, Why Hast Thou Forsaken the Manolo?](http://shoeblogs.com/2010/12/20/google-google-why-hast-thou-forsaken-the-manolo/#more-13002) > > Anecdotally, my personal search results have also been noticeably worse lately. As part of Christmas shopping for my wife, I searched for “iPhone 4 case” in Google. I had to give up completely on the first two pages of search results as utterly useless, and searched Amazon instead. It looks like the first few articles posted on this topic have started a bit of an avalanche. Which means lots of people have been thinking along these lines for a long time, but were afraid to speak up.

Google is going to have to do some house cleaning and PR work, if this keeps going.

> Microsoft will reportedly announce a new Windows-based $200 set-top box using Windows Media Center as its primary interface, according to the [ > *Seattle Times* > ](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2013824940_brier03.html). The company, which has been trying to put a Windows box in living rooms for more than 10 years with little success, is expected to make the announcement during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I can’t believe that Microsoft’s strategy this year is going to be a box running Windows. Again.

When is someone going to fire Ballmer?

And the comparison here shouldn’t be Microsoft TV vs. Google TV. Both products are DOA. The set-top box battle is closer to Roku vs. Apple TV, but even in that case it’s way too early for anyone to have full success with this kind of product.

Jobs wasn’t wrong when he said that this category is never going to be a blockbuster market until someone kills the cable companies. That’s not going to be easy. And whoever does it is either going to have to partner with or buy Netflix.

> Content creation is big business, and there are big players involved. For example, Associated Content, which produces 10,000 new articles per month, was purchased by Yahoo! for $100 million, in 2010. Demand Media has 8,000 writers who produce 180,000 new articles each month. It generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2009 and planning an initial public offering valued at about $1.5 billion. This content is what ends up as the landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web. And these are the first links that show up in your Google search results. I’m glad to see other people start to notice how bad Google search results have gotten. Seriously, with all the SEO crap you have to sift through, we’re actually worse off now than in the old Alta Vista and Yahoo! days. People are gaming the system, and Google is either too busy playing with TV interfaces to care, or more likely, is profiting too much from the manipulation to care. And we’re paying for our naive trust in Google’s “Don’t be Evil” every day.

This is an excellent read. And I agree with the conclusion, that someone needs to swoop in and kick Google to the curb with search.

> As business models go, there are currently two dominant ones: either people like your product enough to purchase it or they don’t care enough to buy it but will overlook its deficiencies if it’s “free” in exchange for their personal browsing and purchasing info sold to advertisers. The former model is Apple’s, the latter is Google’s. Great article, as usual, from Counternotions. Amazing to me how few people understand this fundamental difference between Apple and Google. And how few understand that Google’s mimicking of Microsoft’s old, failing strategy is not a good long-term plan.