It’s been awhile since SES London, and this post has been aging in the back of my mind… like a fine scotch. But before the next stop on the circuit (SES New York), why not reflect a bit more on the fundamental problems with “black hat” SEO?

In the Black-Hat, White-Hat, Unconferenced session at SES London, Mikkel deMib Svendsen highlighted a theme: the “hat color” is irrelevant. What matters is effectiveness. For effect, Mikkel chooses the starkest terms possible, essentially saying that the playing field for marketing is like a theater of war. To back this point up he points to a book by Ries and Trout called Marketing Warfare.

It’s at that point, frankly, that any serious marketer should thank the speakers for their time, and head to dinner. Or at least wander off to refresh their drink.

Presumably, for about half the U.S. population (or slightly less), the perils of fallout such as the recent Afghanistan debacle are matched in importance by the general principles behind the military security operation. The equation changes slightly now, but you wouldn’t  have been there if it hadn’t been for the magnitude and far-reaching consequences of being there, or not being there.

I cannot, and will never, be able to fathom the idea that selling a soft drink, an insurance product, or an aftershave is anything like going to war. We are going to work, not war. And in our work we need to be creative and yes, sometimes ruthlessly competitive. But we should also be excellent in our character, and more worried about the balance between negative fallout from anarchistic behavior, and the positive contributions from effective campaigns.

Maybe it’s that little comfortable part of me that says, hey, we’ve actually got a pretty good gig here. We’re all making money and doing well, and yes, through creative competition some lesser players will go out of business. But why screw it up by bringing a flamethrower to the party?

So, as search marketers, we generate more visibility for companies in search listings, mostly on Google. It’s gotten more complex over the years (new ad formats, new algorithms that black hats can’t outsmart, blended SERP’s, social results and social signals). The goal is to achieve more sales, to be sure. That’s not rocket science.

But the wrinkle is the word “visibility”. The search engine and the consumer have a pretty good panoramic view of how you come across online. They can gauge your character. The “guerrillas” get a lot more than just increased sales — they draw attention to their tactics. Often that attention is unfavorable. I’m suggesting that even if you could do the guerrilla stuff undetected, you shouldn’t. Indeed the mark of character (according to Plato) is that even if you could go about your business under the cloak of invisibility, you wouldn’t go around raping and pillaging.

Do it for yourself. If you think that “stopping at nothing” is the only possible way to move a few more Dyson vacuums, then what else do you believe? How low will you stoop, more generally?

<philosophy nerd hat on>

That debate goes back a long way.

Philosopher Alasdair Macintyre (Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and After Virtue) summed it up in his view that the ancients (particularly Aristotle) meant to bring to the fore a fundamental difference in the honor or quality of human existence and indeed, in people. There are those (the majority — perhaps to be considered just the working stiffs and money-grubbing merchants) who seek only the goods of effectiveness. And a minority of true leaders seek to act justly as well and to create beautiful, timeless objects. These would be the goods of excellence.

Sanctimonious? Perhaps. Elitist? In that context, certainly.

Macintyre doesn’t see much in the modern world to recommend, because a sense of excellence is rarely present. The world, for Macintyre, is drowning in technique and lacking in purpose. Ultimately, I don’t share Macintyre’s specific conclusions, but his critique of mere effectiveness is right on. Effective to what end?

</Philosophy 331 dismissed>

Shouldn’t marketers — like any other professionals — adhere to something akin to a Hippocratic Oath? Can’t we get paid handsomely while upholding principles of dignity and fairness… no matter what nasty things we perceive some competitors (and even Google) to be getting up to?

Plain and simple: marketing is not warfare. Warfare itself is ghastly enough. Why do we need to import its principles to our daily work lives?

Specific people who (in Macintyre’s world view) would be considered prototypical pursuers of only “the goods of effectiveness” might be:

• Machiavelli, and rulers who would follow his tactics
• Nietsche
• Snipers
• Hockey goons

Not too difficult to tack “aggressive marketers” onto that list, is it?

The winning team or the vengeful nation might be very appreciative of the presence of goons and/or snipers. But as a society or as a profession, do we not also aspire for better things? Can goons punch the wrong heads in the wrong places? Don’t snipers often wind up on trial for war crimes? Is there a downside to believing that every realm is a theater of war?

I find it interesting to note that Mikkel didn’t mention another popular book by Ries and Trout: Positioning. Companies, professionals, and agencies that want to work and build excellent products and relationships outside of the shadows want to position themselves as — if not squeaky clean — then at least not goons. Goons get work (until they’re banned outright), but don’t the talented skaters get paid more in the end?

If your job or company revolves around online marketing, and you’ve always wanted to see Bryan Eisenberg in action, the keynote alone is worth the small price of this year’s eMarketing Conference at Fanshawe College in London, ON. As always, it should be a great day of learning and networking… and all within friendly reach of the “breadbasket” (and BlackBerry Patch) of Ontario. Posting this from the “other” London, I guess that makes two visits to the Thames for me inside of two weeks!

See you there.

High level principles here, not a raft of charts, facts, and stats. Some of it is speculative.

With that out of the way, let’s have a deeper look at the warped reality field you’re likely to have to endure over the next couple of years.

As we’ve seen blatantly from recent asset bubbles in stocks, dot com funding, and housing: money and assets warp reality. There is a certain solidity in what is “making money,” even if it’s money borrowed from other people, or the future. That whole tranches of blended, not really blended, subprime loans with a diversified, not really diversified, risk pool, were rated AAA sort of illustrates how seemingly “solid” investments and industries can be just as illusory as any other.

In the next couple of years, everything’s going to be fine for Facebook.

Facebook isn’t going to face any cash flow problems because it’s going to raise billions in an IPO at a reported valuation of $100 billion, on top of all the money it has already raised. It’ll be able to buy just about anything it wants. It’ll be able to delay the pace of monetization in order to improve user satisfaction. It’ll be able to recruit great talent.

Compounding that warping of reality will be convenient devices like their symbiotic relationship with Zynga. Zynga, for their part, enjoy a stunning $9 billion market valuation. They also make up more than three-quarters of all the “fees and subscriptions” revenue shares Facebook enjoys. Facebook has every reason to be nice to Zynga. Zynga has little reason (for now) to be anything but grateful to Facebook.

There is no question that both are big, happening companies. Facebook is enormous enough that its advertising program and other visibility options for advertisers can and will become impressive. But the reality is, they aren’t doing all that well (from the standpoint of advertising programs) for a company that has raised the amount of money it has. And with their own IPO money sloshing around, along with a lot of other bubble money sloshing around and heading Facebook’s way, the financials the public sees are likely to be a pretty warped reality field. Facebook can delay full monetization for years, just as Google has done with YouTube and Google+.

Being so well funded, companies like these may look better than they are. Do they ask they hard questions about massive de facto subsidies of partners and product? Monetize intelligently and truly serve advertisers? Will their expansion plans and mass hires lead to a culture of excess and entitlement? Those are all bad precedents to set and eventually these matters need to be addressed when the easy dollars stop, and the hard dollars need to be made.

If you’re enjoying a first mover advantage or an investor-driven subsidy, things look pretty good until you start coming up against an even bigger subsidizer (Google, for example), or when the market for what you’re doing turns down in an economic sense.

Due to the mutually-supporting nature of the assets driving this long bubble, the financial picture painted can be a rosy one for a long time to come, much as the housing bubble went on partying right up until it crashed.

Speaking of that, a look at a long list of recent digital media IPO’s turns up a raft of companies with no earnings or extremely high P/E ratios: Pandora, Zillow, Liveperson, LinkedIn, Angie’s List, and the list goes on. The majority of these companies have continued to float along in suspended animation at high valuations. Those with solid financials, like TripAdvisor and Demand Media, have garnered relatively little respect. Such is the bizarro world of “story” companies that aren’t judged on financials but on future prospects (as long as they don’t run through all their cash).

When the cash is flowing a little less freely, and the myriad “coopetitors” take the gloves off on partnership terms, start laying people off, spending less on product, and cutting back marketing dollars, someone’s going to get hurt — not least investors who buy into “easy money” revenue numbers and fail to see the challenges on the horizon. There are finite limits to this universe, and the phenomenon of users getting bored and ignoring the ads — always one that created a sense of productive paranoia at Google — hasn’t been much  discussed by analysts of many of these companies. But then again, many of these companies are new to the monetization thing.

Elsewhere, I’ve expressed skepticism that black hat techniques are relevant to the world of paid search. Let’s look at some aggressive techniques that are worth considering – and aren’t necessarily black hat. Let’s call them “edgy.”

Confusion in “hat” debates in PPC arose when some players began calling “edgy” techniques “black hat.” If you’re worried about the cool factor, rest assured that everyone in marketing looks sexy in cowboy hats, whether they’re black or white.

Edgy techniques involve pushing normal campaign management routines to the limits, or inventing new ways to achieve goals outside of the “prescribed” optimization techniques. You may not find these in a Google AdWords certification course.

Surely, you wouldn’t overpay for car insurance if having a contact or a bit of insider knowledge gave you a better discount than your less-savvy neighbor who just tried to haggle with his agent over the phone? That’s business.

Edgy techniques include:

• Competitive intelligence: Many tools provide additional research opportunities beyond what was once seen as the norm. Two of the best-liked are AdGooroo and SpyFu. Brand name sector research can also come from the likes of comScore and Hitwise; it’s expensive, but may be worth it.
• Multiple account serving: Google doesn’t want to leave revenue on the table for no good reason. So the rules here have become more flexible. If you have two distinct lines of business that overlap on some keywords, chances are you could show up twice on the page for the same keyword. At one time, Google prohibited this. Here’s a key distinction: it’s black hat if you do it for cookie-cutter businesses that are almost entirely the same, while trying to avoid detection by Google. Eventually, Google will detect it – no matter what you do. It’s as simple as a competitor ratting you out or a Googler making a few purchases. Do it that way, and you risk losing all credibility with Google. Another approach is to work with Google. Under Google’s formal (evolving) policies, there are permitted uses depending on the degree of overlap.
• Dynamic landing page titles and other forms of automation: If you want to build gigantic accounts and do any number of things to try to improve user response on more granular landing pages, no one is necessarily stopping you. It can work for some businesses, not so much for others. Depending on how unwieldy that same strategy makes your actual account, as measured against your spend and importance in the grand scheme of things, Google is either going to become annoyed with the ambitious scope of your account, or not. Users are either going to convert better, or not. Either way, it’s not necessarily black hat. Before creating more bulk, though, consider whether your business model and strategy have enough meat on their bones to warrant the mega-build, mega-automation approach.
• Large keyword lists: Avoid the temptation to benchmark the size of your keyword list in the aggregate. Quality campaigns are driven by the logic of their campaign and ad group structure, not the sheer number of keyword variations – but you should be striving to grow your list, within reason. In days gone by, black hat abuses of the fact that it’s free to add keywords were largely driven by affiliates and click arbitragers, who would happily bid low on any potential keyword imaginable, regardless of relevance. That led Google to change many rules, and to institute caps. But former black hat use of big keyword lists doesn’t take away from the fact that you might have a high number of SKUs or a desire to get very granular in the geography of your account setup. In such cases, your account might surpass a formal limitation on the number of campaigns or keywords. If it’s being done for legitimate reasons, ask Google to waive the cap. Just keep your priorities straight.
• Saying you’re the best when you’re not: Yikes, you can’t even do that. There are guidelines that steer you away from making false or unverifiable claims in ad copy. But of course, there are hundreds of ways to tell a compelling story in ad copy: some bogus, some merely aspirational. Knowing the difference is essential. If you’ve never even read “All Marketers Are Liars” by Seth Godin, which explores the mindset needed to build brand equity by telling a better story, then what are you doing “black hatting around,” staring Google down at every opportunity, when you could be just doing better marketing?

This barely scratches the surface of edgy techniques that may come into play as competition heats up.

Of course, black hats and black-hat-friendly loopholes haven’t vanished.

For example, what if a competitor pretends to be located in 50 cities so they can run geo-specific campaigns? If they “shade” the rules, is it black hat, gray hat, or just annoying because now you have to decide whether to follow suit?

This leads to a broader conversation you’ll have to have with yourself, beyond any single example. With the recent proliferation of paid search advertising features and ad formats, there are tons of settings, tactics, and “things to watch” that can lead the curious search marketer to wonder “what would happen if…”

To take one example, it’s widely rumored that in 2012 Google is going to accelerate its move into the “Groupon space” in a big way with Google Offers. Some advertiser offers, with a bright logo, could be integrated with AdWords ad units… just another potential new ad format rolling out.  (This has nothing to do with unfounded speculation that “get offers” like this is a special type of ad unit with any shelf life. That is indeed a special ad unit, but it’s open to many types of advertisers. In Groupon’s case, it’s going to be tough sledding when Google moves in with the real Google Offers integration.)

Will some advertisers think to overdo the offers so that they qualify for more visibility on a particular keyword query, grabbing attention from advertisers who don’t use offers? Will that be unfair because it compares apples with oranges?

The offers space itself has certainly proven itself to be “edgy” in more ways than one. Some merchants have been so “edgy,” they’ve lost money with every sale (but made it up on volume), without the hoped-for repeat business.

So that’s going to be another tough choice for advertisers to make in 2012. Just as it felt like some click deflation was on the horizon and sound business models had a chance out there in the auction, advertisers are going to have to weigh the group deals loss leader phenomenon as it appears more prominently in Google’s sandbox.

Probably the same advice would apply to pretty much any offers scenario: try to run small tests, or don’t run them at all. Or in Jim Collins’ terminology: bullet, bullet, bullet, cannonball.

An earlier version of this column appeared at ClickZ on June 18, 2010. Reprinted by permission.

At an ecommerce industry event recently, I heard some amazing statistics — and amazing, but all-too-familiar, anecdotes — about the sorry state of Canadian etail.

Let’s be clear: the Canadian consumer is at the forefront of the digital lifestyle. On average, more connected, more into online apps, more into searching, more into Facebook and YouTube, more likely to use online banking and other cloud tools, etc.

But one stat that is floating around is that Canadian ecommerce currently makes up little more than 1% of retail in the country, vs. 7% in the U.S.

Anecdotally, leading consultants in things like logistics will speak of their struggles *a decade ago* to convince large retailers to build ecommerce empires around their existing logistics juggernauts and strong brands. One was Sears (at the time); and in the consultant’s words: “they decided to buy Eaton instead.”

Today, Sears Canada (which has made more serious efforts online in recent years) is under threat from Target, so the great news for consumers is that Sears is slashing prices to meet the threat. Great for consumers: bad for Sears.

When will companies across the board begin to realize that their short-term maneuvers in this often-failing sector are no substitute for grabbing the online opportunity and its superior efficiencies?

There are key bright spots. But should Well.ca really have to carry the entire mantle for the notion of a pure play ecommerce startup in Canada?

Long term, it may not matter. Eventually the large US players will simply turn on their ecommerce functionality in Canada and that will presumably take us most of the way.

For the time being, from the consumer standpoint there are many key barriers, as compared with their US counterparts.

• Amazon is not “the store” here as it is in the US. The offering is very limited. Even with books, inventories are different and people have to wait more than they should.

• The development of shopping comparison engines and Google offerings & products (back in the day, “Froogle,” today, a variety of takes on Product Search) has hit many roadblocks. In part that’s because merchants have been slow to get on board. It’s a combination of culture and smaller scale, but the culture must be a big part of that. Still, you would think that Google Canada in partnership with their US parent could at some point have taken some of the bigger players (no, I don’t mean Canadian Tire; mostly, I mean US companies operating in Canada) aside, given them featured billing and support so that they showed up all over the place in the product search offerings, enough to send a wake-up call to the other vendors that their competitors are basically running the table out there because they’re the only ones who have bothered to integrate with Google.

• The opportunity is about 8-12% the size it is in the US. So if you are generous and say that e-commerce as a proportion of retail gets up to 1/3 where it is in the US, you’re talking about a market size maybe 4% of the US. Despite our market in general being reasonably-sized, having that small economic opportunity all spread out across a nation means rather terrible things for the infrastructure and ecosystem. Agencies, infrastructure builders, content providers, and other professionals and tool developers don’t get enough to eat from anything but the largest accounts. Opportunities aren’t chased with gusto. So the end client can’t execute optimally.

• Offline shopping is very convenient for many Canadians, and possibly even enjoyable. Contrary to popular belief, Canada is more urbanized on the whole than the US. And across our small number of known urban centres, each has its own quirks (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, other parts of Ontario, etc.) that need to be taken account of.

• But with all that being said, many Canadians crave the consumer choice and cost advantage they know Americans have online. Many wish they didn’t have to order from US stores to get exactly what they want, or for that exact piece of furniture they want, order from the only retailer in the country that has it (say, that Vancouver place with the indifferent service, high shipping fees, and outrageous prices).

Turmoil is all around us, old assumptions no longer valid.

Richard Florida deftly lays out the scenario for the current economic and spatial Great Reset. Bob Garfield outlines the Chaos Scenario in traditional media and advertising (upon which I comment favorably here). Friendly, iron-fist in a velvet glove American liberalism-cum-imperialism is laid to waste in Chris Hedges’ Death of the Liberal Class. Seth Godin refers to a “forever recession,” somehow managing to remain optimistic (“and the coming revolution”) on behalf of the self-starters who can connect with markets by becoming extraordinary.

In light of this you’d think it would have percolated through to even the most frozen-in-amber members of the business-as-usual, Boomer-ec0nomic-boom-beneficiaries, that something is permanently different. As in not the same as before.

Yet a big ad agency demographer writing for Ad Age opines that the “millennials just might save our economic bacon” if they would “just begin acting a bit more like boomers.” Supposedly a statistician, he concludes the piece with “optimists such as myself continue to believe that the all-powerful primal human desire to have a home and produce children will prevail over whatever economic and political obstacles stand in the way”.

Let’s review.

In many societies around the world, the “all-powerful priman human desire” has taken a back seat to a declining fertility rate. Some countries have dropped from a fertility rate of 7 or 8 to just over 2 in a quarter of a century. In Europe and Japan, fertility rates are extremely low and the result (unless immigration increases) is an aging population and a smaller workforce, setting up an undeniable future fiscal burden for pensions and healthcare that can’t be outrun or outgrown. Even “Catholic” countries like Costa Rica have gotten into the action, some with fertility rates below 2. Check out the data on Iran, while you’re at it.

It seems nearly everywhere you go, people are having fewer babies. The blame lies where? Economics (affordability of families), more time spent in advanced study, cultural changes (less religion), women’s equality, women’s interest in careers, modernization, and a few other things.

Flip ahead to marriage and home life. Average age of marriage in many societies climbs inexorably towards (and eventually past?) 35. A skyrocketing percentage of adults over 30 (and yes, over 40 and over 50) live as “singletons”. Changing habits, changing tastes. This is permanent.

You can go broke waiting around for yesterday’s demographic trends and yesterday’s assumptions of secular, continuous growth in “this sector or that sector” or “the economy”. You’ll also be mistaken if you think “millennials” will soon become receptive to the same old media messages, broadcast in the same old ways. “Primal urges” don’t appear to trump the need to get more granular with your analysis in this, the most granular of ages ever seen.

Google’s recent financial results weren’t nearly as bad as the markets seemed to think. By any rational standard, once again they turned in a strong Q4 and strong YOY growth. Earnings were very solid. All they did was miss Wall Street expectations slightly.

If revenues and profits were up sharply — but below expectations — were there any red flags at all?

It appears so. While total paid clicks were up 34% year over year, click prices in the form of average CPC’s were actually down a whopping 8% from the same period in 2010.

Google didn’t provide a breakdown, unfortunately. Did much of that come as a result of the growth in less targeted display advertising? It doesn’t appear so, because network clicks grew more slowly than clicks on Google-owned properties. So the softness is either within Google Search or YouTube or both.

What about search clicks? What about the prices of commercially valuable terms in hospitality, financial services, health, education, and real estate? What is happening now, and financially speaking, what will happen down the road with, the increases in paid local searches? Google doesn’t have to tell us, unfortunately.

There seems little question that the market for paid clicks is showing a bit of pricing vulnerability, in any case.

And what is perhaps doubly red-flaggish about that is that it is occurring in the wake of Google taking a variety of steps to exact higher CPC’s to wring more profit out of the existing traffic to Google Search.

Some search marketers believe that terminology within the interface, default settings, and even certain tools and reports, are intended to “frame” the auction so that a higher bid appears logical in order to achieve your marketing objectives. So with all of that Google intellectual firepower going into making higher bids seem sensible, the financial results indicate that marketers are largely turning up their noses at these bits of subtle persuasion.

Take, for example, the Bid Simulator tool. Personally, I’ve found it useful because it can remind you that currently, your volume could go up more than you think if you raise bids on a keyword — even if your reported average ad position is already high. That is, in part, due to the fact that Quality Score now determines eligibility for as well as position in any given keyword auction. If you have middling to low quality scores on a keyword, a higher bid may increase not only your ad position, but your “eligibility” to be served each and every time a relevant search query is generated by a user.

This projection tool works sensibly in the case of a specific term using a tight match type, such as the phrase match for “buy green barbie”.

It doesn’t work very well at all for broad-matched terms such as the broad match for “ontario place” or “love handles”. That’s because such terms have a huge reach potential (if you’re willing to bid into the stratosphere), but at a very high bid, they achieve that potential only by showing your ad to ludicrously untargeted searchers, and by cannibalizing traffic away from your more specific, well-optimized keywords. In this case, the Bid Simulator becomes relatively uninformative and relatively useless.

The real question I have is: (1) Did Google build things like this on purpose so that novice and lazy advertisers mess up their accounts and bid higher to gain added impression share, willy-nilly?; or (2) Did this just not occur to them at all? Did they just throw up the tool without any of this occurring to them?

Both possibilities are disturbing. I think I’m actually less disturbed by (1) — the prospect that Google was evil. When someone is evil, you are always planning your counter-move. With (2) — the notion that there are well-meaning folks pecking away at creating moderately useful features, but overall, are just mailing it in — would mean that institutional memory and passion at Google have given away to an uncoordinated mishmash of people just doing their jobs. The latter makes for a pretty boring narrative for a poor ol’ blogger.

The latest debates over Google Search results, search quality, antitrust, and other drama are only the latest in a long period of rapid change for Google in the search arena. That period, pretty much the past seven years, has been marked by (a) growth in new technology and soft innovations intended to handle the scale of search as well as more complex user intent puzzles; (b) the ongoing challenges Google faces in satisfying public expectations of relevant results in an environment characterized by gaming and spam. Other trends have included (c) mobile, (d) the rapid growth in video and the resulting changes in user information consumption, and (e) people’s adoption of Facebook-like social environments to make sense of their worlds. All these trends, ultimately, funnel back into the search experience. When it comes to (e), and perhaps numerous other trends, they’re new worlds for Google. In spite of its size and ability to assimilate and acquire new technologies, Google suddenly discovered it was poorly situated to respond to evolving user needs. “Getting social” didn’t seem to be in its DNA. Angrily, Google developer Steve Yegge ranted that Google “doesn’t get platform.” [Note: you'll probably need to log into Google+ to read this rant.]

Google has had an easy ride in this period. Bing has been its only serious competitor in search. That being said, rivals like Wolfram Alpha, Blekko, and Ixquick have all found their way onto the radar screens of those searching for alternatives.

But the real threat is Facebook, etc. And in the face of that threat, Google has done something close to panicking. It’s very reminiscent of the panic exhibited by Microsoft when it went all in playing catchup with the shift to Internet computing.

While it’s panicking about a massive paradigm shift, some people are complaining that garden-variety search is where Google dropped the ball. They imply that Google has arbitrarily voided something akin to a sacred social contract with its users, by changing the “no clutter” clause in our relationship with them.

I don’t need to show you all of the accusations that Google Search has deteriorated and that the results are now “crap”. I’m sure you seen plenty of these claims. But Dave Winer’s is worth noting.

Those types of claims stem from a few different points of view and motivations, not even counting those that are revulsed by Google’s pecuniary interest in showing relevant ads next to the results.

To attempt to aggregate the whole landscape of criticism, there seems to be an overall claim that Google has fought a losing battle with spammy results and as a result has turned to cheap shortcuts to mask this fact. Certainly, it has seemed that various crackdowns on link farms and “content farms,” sometimes with cute names, have not fixed some of the cracks in Google’s early assumptions. The problem with cracking down on “excessive” link building or “thin” content is that you need to then come up with a model that definitively satisfies some ideal of relevance — an ideal Google hadn’t given much thought to in its founding.

Google has replaced laser relevance in the ten blue links (which it can’t attain) with universal/blended search — a variegated set of new ad formats and content types. Google has greater control over some of these other (non-web) data sources, so they’re less likely to be spammy. Note: that’s also why Bing works well for many users.

Moreover, if some of them are spammy, so what? As a user, you were given a menu of choices, so you clicked on a YouTube video and were mildly entertained. Or you found a leading brand name or quality news source in the blended results, somehow, and then somehow did enough additional research to find your way to what you wanted.

That’s another specific complaint you hear: that Google Search more often than not takes “brand” as a proxy for relevance, which starves us for variety and essentially hands search over to well heeled corporate sites and media companies.

Google may actually be more thin-skinned about this claim than they should be! It may indeed be part of what has motivated them to try so hard to find yet another sweeping solution to their broken paradigm — a sweeping solution that to me is likely to produce disturbing results. More on that below.

Back to defending Google circa 2010-2011 against the “anti-crap” claims, for now.

In essence, you quite often hear two or three different arguments that Google Search results are “crap”: (1) There are too many spammy results; (2) There are too many brands in there getting a “free pass” that prevents “true relevance” from coming to the fore; (3) Google’s way of masking their inability to define or reveal true relevance – the “blended solution” – is itself a copout that provides the illusion of variety, but in practice, is a fence-sitting “cover” for Google’s technological failures.

None of these complaints are all right, or all wrong. But (2) in particular is a good indicator that we actually may have a problem, not with Google Search, but with the whole process and idea of Web Search.

I’ve been using Google Search more heavily for cooking in the past year or so. Google has always been pretty great for quick access to recipes, no matter how poorly you used it. More recently, trying to solidify their status in this area, the company created something like an app for recipes that a bunch of people no doubt played with.

In hindsight, here’s what I discovered. I had been all too willing in the past to jump on a variety of recipes from second and third tier recipes sites. They’re good, they’re fun, and there is no shortage of user give-and-take on these sites to help you decide how or whether to make a dish.

At the end of the day, though, compared with sticking with just a single classic “home economics” media brand (say, a well-liked magazine with thousands of incredible recipes built up over the years — OK, OK, I really refuse to identify the recipe site I’m enjoying, because my wife and her mother both subscribe to the print magazine if you know what I mean!), these “generic,” “upstart” sites are amateurish. Over time I’ve learned to seek out and click on the “big media brand” sites more often and cooking those dishes more often. If there was any kind of measuring stick for culinary goodness, the mishmash of generic sites would score a 6, and some of the brand sites’ recipes would score a 9. Both types of website are “communities,” and there is no reason an upstart, chaotic “community” should be considered as somehow more special than one with a 75-year history that also has community features. They’re simply different. Shiny new objects aren’t always inherently better.

I’m sure many users have felt the same way.

Search results reflect those user clickstreams. Brands aren’t favored by Google, they’re favored by users because users both trust them ahead of time and like what they see when they get there.

So when it comes to cooking and recipes (for example), Dave Winer’s specific complaint is utter balderdash. (That being said, there is wisdom in his broader assessment of the sacred trusts that Google seems to think nothing of violating.) For a searcher with a shred of initiative, Google’s results are not crap. Some of what you see is crap to you, and some of it is relevant to you. Personalization is doing a pretty good job of giving us types of sites that we do like to see. I would love to see it do better and I think it would if given the chance.

And users likely feel and behave the same way when it comes to cars, personal finance, and a thousand other verticals. For every Autoblog or Seeking Alpha, there are just too many crap sites out there, so the brands actually deserve their good rankings. I’d rather read Car & Driver articles or a top tweet from a leading finance guru than joescrapesaboutcars.net or investitu2cando.com.

It stands to reason, then, that every search engine and every social app or environment is working on this problem. They have not solved it. The generics and the strivers are more likely to provide the “crap” results than the brands are. Hence, as an interim and even a long term solution, many of the brands win because they’ve earned it, and they invest in quality content because they are real editorial organizations.

To augment the obvious, most trusted content, to find the upstarts like Seeking Alpha or Autoblog — or for that matter, the popular Twitter-centric expert — and to allow them to grow their reputations, is no easy feat.

So what is Google doing to continue to try to solve that problem? How is it tapping into additional social signals and complex measures of reputation and quality to continue to improve your search experience? By doing more things like it did when it acquired PostRank? By partnering with Twitter? By respecting the results provided by Yelp and TripAdvisor?

To me, that’s where it breaks down. Google jumps ahead mentally, past its garden-variety problems, and launches Search Plus Your World.

Now a bunch of my “contacts” will fix all the problems with web search, since I’ll know know what my peer group thinks about everything! And a whole bunch of that ongoing activity will be affecting the baseline quality and relevance data that affects everyone’s search results. Great. But as most agree, Google was either doing a good job gradually fixing core search problems, or it has been doing a bad job, and should work harder on solving them. Either way, its resources are still needed on those problems.

First of all, let me just say this much: I am inherently suspicious of any company that reaches this level of puffery in a product launch statement — this by esteemed Google Fellow Amit Singal, no less:

While there may be 7 billion people and 197 million square miles on Earth, a septillion stars and a trillion webpages, we spend our short, precious lives living in a particular town, with particular friends and family, orbiting a single star and relying on a tiny slice of the world’s information. Our dream is to have technology enable everyone to experience the richness of all their information and people around them.

We named our company after the mathematical number googol as an aspiration toward indexing the countless answers on webpages, but that’s only part of the picture. The other part is people, and that’s what Search plus Your World is all about.

So Google loves people. Finally.

Also first of all, this move does not do anything fundamental to reduce “spam” or “crap.” Sensibly, Eric Enge recently pointed out that “links were a better quality signal when the world didn’t know they were a signal.” Upping the ante to include a whole bunch of idiosyncratic Google platform features in your “must-do’s” as a marketer or content producer doesn’t make life more relevant for users. It just sends millions of SEO’s and social media gamers scurrying to set up the latest “please the algorithm” projects for their clients. In terms of the cat-and-mouse game that is supposed to provide users with a useful search tool, it’s basically like adding a dimension to the former chess game that mostly involved links. So what? Same game.

Moreover, while it certainly might be cool or interesting to augment search results with peer recommendations, +1′s, and whatever else Google will do to ape likes, tweets, and social sharing that were pioneered by competing media companies like Digg, Twitter, Facebook, etc., it leads towards a wholesale swapping of the model of searching that most everyone is expected to use. So shocking, coming from introverted geniuses who up until about two years ago mostly admitted they didn’t care for social media, the trend in your Google+-influenced online experience will mimic the broader trend in the workplace: the assumption that extroversion is normal and leads to productivity. For more on this, see Susan Cain’s sad chronicle of The Rise of the New Groupthink (New York Times, Jan. 13.)

Crowdsource your whole life. It’s catching.

Until Facebook had a movie made about it, most people instinctively knew that it was the introvert in us that generally retreated from the noise, and got stuff done. Now the cheery chatterboxes are ascendant. Certainly, it seems like just creating products that work effectively — so we can “get stuff done” — has lost its cachet. Just ask Steve Yegge.

Long term, it’s hard to say what Google will do. But for now, it appears obsessed with Google+ and its sudden ability to contribute to our search experience (just six months after launch). Even when more people — far more — spontaneously use Facebook. No one Google+’s anything, do they? Do people really +1 things? They tweet them. But more and more people will feel pressured into using the +1 thing “too,” which makes “+1″ one of the most aptly-named new (but not really new) actions of all time.

This “our dog food or you’re dog meat” attitude certainly can’t be coming from a search engine, can it?

Surely not one that is a Trustmark… one that used to have a social contract with users about not being evil?

Sadly, yes.

This doesn’t necessarily violate antitrust laws, as Jerry Brito attempts to argue.

But if you’re of a Dave Winer bent, it does tear up the social contract we as searchers all thought we had with Google. To be sure, it’s something Facebook — if left to its own devices — would also do. Facebook, but pretty much no one else. The “who is less evil” contest between Google and Facebook has not been setting the bar particularly high lately.

Google is pulling out all its flamethrowers seemingly because it has tunnel vision about one thing, mainly: beating Facebook at “that”. Whatever that is. And if your privacy, Yelp’s legal rights, Twitter’s contribution to our collective social life, etc., should get in the way, then so be it. Flame on.

So does Google “get platform” now? As Steve Yegge has been urging them to do?

Hardly. Platform means ecosystem. That means playing well with others — suppliers, contributors, information providers, partners, the technology world, and on down the list. Microsoft, Mr. Yegge even refers to as a “platform”. He lauds Amazon for being one.

So Google can’t “get social” if they can’t “get platform.” They need to get better at not elbowing every single potential collaborator (who they view as competitors) out of the way with the arrogant assumption that they can build something better and just plain take over (Knol, Google Reviews and Places, Chrome, Android, anyone?)

So are Google results crap? If you’d asked me that a year ago, I would have launched into the above lecture about how the seemingly crap results you see are pretty much inherent to the kind of searching we do with search engines today. And that Google is working on core search, as it should. That’s something I support.

Instead, they’ve actually tried to move beyond crap.

But as Mr. Brito points out, that seems to have unleashed a tricky market response. Some users may applaud the new paradigm, and Google’s ability to move “beyond the crap” of the previous generation of search. Others may less charitably conclude that Google is trying to escape its crap by producing search results that are “beyond crap.”

Google wants to control more elements of your social world now. They don’t just want to be a search engine.

Is that so bad? Maybe not. It’s certainly no different from how other companies, from AOL, to Microsoft, to Apple, to Disney, to Facebook, have viewed the world — as ideally a walled garden, an all-consuming platform that most people use for pretty much every form of entertainment and social interaction.

A lot of people thought that Google was somehow different. They were, of course, wrong.

The specific implications of all of this mostly come down to Google’s enormous size and scope. The fallout is on your privacy, and on thousands if not millions of companies’ right to operate their businesses in a fair, competitive environment. If that isn’t strictly a legal issue, it’s close to one. It certainly speaks to Google’s blind spot as identified by Mr. Yegge, the one it’s ironically trying to remedy by taking shortcuts: its failure to “get platform.”

To move forward either as the old Google or Google+, Google needs to be capable of making fair deals with the partner ecosystem. It needs to curb its instinct to kill competing media companies that were actually producing great content that Google helped you find. Can it? Will it?

You’ve been through it. Everyone you know has probably been through it, at some point.

Your website and the platform is built on are now five (or, aaaghh! seven or eight!) years old, and your website redesign and relaunch are long overdue. But what pain are you going to endure, and how much money will you spend (lose?) before you come out the “other side”?

That was the premise of our session at SES Chicago last November, “Navigating the Dip: Planning a Successful Site Relaunch” (with thanks to Seth Godin for inspiration).

It may be comforting to say to yourself “hey, if it doesn’t work out, we’ll just revert to the old site, and keep on makin’ money that way.”

And in the abstract, pundits may sound very clever in advising you to keep an open mind, and to ignore sunk costs in your criteria for which strategy to pursue.

During this panel, one discussant breezily stated that you should try (using the world’s fanciest CMS?) somehow rotating the old site and the new site, slowly pecking away at the new one until it’s perfected before dropping the old.

The reality is, it doesn’t work that way.

Many companies bring a dozen reasons for relaunch to the relaunch party. In the case study I covered, the technology was so outdated and so limiting that the entrepreneur (mid-sized ecommerce company in household goods) did not relaunch because they wanted to… but because they had to.

And the same thing seems fair to state about the new Search Engine Watch, the case study Jonathan Allen cheerfully brought to the table. Take an old site that is now full of new ideas, functionality, and flair after a relaunch (with some hiccups, or major hiccups depending on who is giving the case study presentation). Even if not everything went swimmingly — even if the profit rate post relaunch got worse in the short term, for example — there’s pretty much 0% chance you’d go back to the previous site, with its old design, older way of presenting the news, and its various other outmoded elements. Can you imagine what users would say to a company that couldn’t relaunch its website in this day and age, that went back to the 12-year-old design with the old-time “binoculars” logo associated with a long-gone founder? No, sometimes you just can’t revert. You soldier on and make the new thing work, somehow.

What is truly frightening about this — the fact that, in any real world case studies of significant site relaunches, the architects of it are pretty much going “all in” on sweeping change that materially affects the business — to a great extent, you are jumping without a net. You’re contradicting the soundest of business advice (see Jim Collins, Great By Choice): “bullet, bullet, bullet, then calibrated cannonball.” A major relaunch is too much like firing your cannonballs without knowing what the result will be. With the possibility that you may find yourself out of cannonballs before you hit the target.

So, you’d better have an incredibly solid plan. And while you may be digesting many changes at once, if there are any big changes you can put off for one year, you’d better do so. Otherwise the chaos could sink you.

This puts me in mind of Google of late.

Formerly, Google was all about bullet, bullet, bullet, calibrated cannonball. That’s how they came to be so dominant in search, search ads, and display ads.

But then they went all in with Google+.

Then, they acquired Motorola.

Think it’ll be possible, if they continue to flounder in social media, to simply turn the clock back, turn off Google+, and act like nothing happened, maybe launch yet another attempt to “get social” in a year or two? No way. Google is all in with this thing.

And if the Motorola acquisition and the plans to build devices seem not to be panning out… knowing Larry Page the way we do, and how he has now become so associated with this latest phase of the company’s development… how likely is it that Google would crisply “cut bait” and change course? It seems unlikely. Rather, Google plans to stubbornly pursue a long-term plan to achieve Apple-like cult device status.

(Does all the shuttering of loose ends in the company make Larry feel “crisper,” perhaps deceptively so? I doubt the same cold-blooded attitude will be possible if some of the current strategies don’t pan out. They are too all-encompassing to be amenable to “fail-fast” tests of potential.)

Maybe this is why investors are starting to sell off Google stock. This latest round of “all in” behavior may be a noble quest from the standpoint of insiders, but it signals a change in the type of company Google is.

The strange part is, it feels like Google launched Google+ and acquired Motorola not because they wanted to, but because they had to.

Of course, the “safer” path (not doing these things, not creating a self-imposed Dip to push through) may lead to what Godin called the ‘cul-de-sac’ or ‘the cliff’. So it’s not like it would have been safer for Google to sit on their hands, to let others take those markets. You don’t always have a choice.

Facebook is free, essentially for three reasons:

• People pay for apps and games, and Facebook’s cut of that subsidizes the platform
• You view and/or click on ads, and that also subsidizes the platform
• 9-figure investments have allowed Facebook to “undermonetize” its huge investment in creating and supporting the user experience

A fourth reason: you, the consumer, refuse to pay.

This dynamic applies to most of the rest of the Internet, too. The things you enjoy are monetized primarily with ads. Services like:

• Google Search
• GMail
• Content sites

Some services are virtually entirely firewalled. Don’t pay, don’t see the content. They run little to no advertising. An example is Angie’s List.

Despite some pockets of paid content online, the majority of consumers don’t embrace paid services. They prefer ad-supported apps and services. That’s clear based on behavior — though it might run counter to what people sometimes say they prefer.

Can you imagine paying $100 a year for Twitter? If so, and you can round up 100 million other people who think the same way, I strongly suggest you begin launching companies that charge $100/yr. for social apps, and get on the road for VC funding. Things like this rarely do get funded, since most everything of this nature is free (or “freemium”)… perhaps because there is a powerful logic behind scale and network effects, and $100 is a huge barrier to that.

Consumers have been shelled by untargeted advertising for the past century, and advertisers keep doing it because it works. But it has been an enormously wasteful era. More than that, it’s become annoying to people. It’s surprising consumers mainly rebel against this in behavior, rather than squealing about it in an aggrieved fashion. Perhaps because Old Media is Legitimate and they have Many Friends who Work in News or Sports Marketing or TV Production (etc.).

Much of the more highly-targeted advertising that has cropped up online is supposed to make it more efficient to find targeted customers. That way, companies won’t have to waste money bothering people who aren’t interested in their offers.

What cannot happen is, we cannot shut off all online advertising (which, according to reports, now makes up 16% of global advertising dollars and evidently is very slowly but surely creeping up). We can’t even shut off half of it. And we shouldn’t be overreacting to new targeting methods if — when you regulate them sensibly — they turn out to be preferable to Old Media Ad Bombardment.

Many people seem to squeal about online advertising as if total elimination were a viable option. These are the vocal folks who comment in response to alarmingly vague government crackdowns on behavioral online advertising.

In the sidebar to this story, the news source in question (CBC.ca, which, as one commenter pointed out, uses at least three intrusive user tracking cookies) is conducting a poll as to “whether a targeted ad ever made you feel uneasy.” (No polls on “what level of government subsidy of news organizations would make you feel uneasy as a taxpayer”.) Currently, the poll is running at 83% “yes”… but what does that mean? I answered yes. If you’ve ever been online, the answer should be yes. It should be at 100%. What is this supposed to prove? Are policy-makers supposed to worry every time someone feels “uneasy” about something?

If consumer protection is what governments do, do something useful and ban outrageous bank fees. I feel “uneasy” every time I have to pay $2.00 when I stumble into the wrong ATM.

The more interesting question is, when was the last time you answered a poll about whether an apparel ad in a glossy magazine made you feel uneasy, or whether a silly ad for diapers made you feel uneasy. There is a constant barrage from old media insidiously pointing the finger at “creepy” (online) targeted advertising without a peep of protest about the sad (much worse) excesses of legacy advertising in general.

Decade in, decade out, people have put up with a flood of unwanted messages at their doorsteps, on TV, on the roads, and pretty much anywhere they turn. But many are dead certain they’re against all this creepy stuff that is happening to them online.

Fine. Sure. Go ahead. Shut off the ads. Avoid them. Whether you Tivo or join a monastery, that’s your right. That’s everyone’s right!

But don’t handcuff the industry as a whole with draconian legislation.

Not unless you’re fine paying for Google Search.

For GMail.

While we’re at it, for the other Google apps you use that are also subsidized by the ads.

And for reading the content on pretty much every website you visit.

For the most part, the people designing systems for more targeted advertising online have been well-meaning. They’ve also been greedy, in the good sense of greed-is-good… searching for efficiencies because they’d stand to benefit from discovering them.

It would have been easy enough to be less scrupulous about targeting, be less concerned with relevance, to sit back and allow cheaper, run-of-site ads to rule the day. Or to simply charge fixed rates to advertise on search engines.

That would have been lose-lose for everyone. Without the improved ad rates that come with better targeting, many services would simply shut down. Those that continued would bombard you with spammy, mass market ads for Pampers, Bud, and curly fries… just like good ol’ TV.

So, those are the trade-offs. Those are the choices. Consumers want to walk around in an ad-free world, until they actually talk to a single business owner — maybe a member of their family — who has built a business around it. Both publishers and advertisers rely on innovations in online advertising. They’re vital to the economy and employ millions of people.

Firm, but fair, privacy policies should be in place to protect consumers from abuses. But it’s misguided to believe that online advertising should be crippled by legislation based on some fantasy world where investors fund content providers and services forever so that consumers can continue to enjoy those services for free while attacking those businesses’ right to maximize their ability to monetize them through targeted advertising.