Google Wrestles Microsoft for Media Spotlight

Techwriter10 0 Tallied Votes 451 Views Share

I'm special, so special.
I got to have some of your attention, give it to me!
~Pretenders, Brass in Pocket

Ah the games companies play trying so hard to get our attention. For the last 6 weeks or so Microsoft has done a fine job of turning the media attention machine on itself, so you just knew that there was no way Google was going to sit still while Bing stole the spotlight. Uh-uh, no way - there was something coming. You could just feel it - and we're not talking about buying On2 last week. That may interest some video geeks, but it doesn't warrant mainstream attention like say changing the way you run your search engine.

Competition breeds innovation and the change cycle is fast and furious. I'm talking of course about Caffeine, the new search algorithm introduced by Google this week. Oh yes, this is definitely a call for attention. Got mine.

What's This All About

Google announced on Monday it was releasing an entirely new way to crawl and index the web. In their own words:

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.

Don't you love the weight of those words. Can't you feel how big it is? It's huge right? We have to pay attention don't we? Of course we do. This is Google after all and they are changing the way they rank sites. If you aren't paying attention to this you could get lost in the search results. Don't think it can't happen. In fact, it happened to me the last time that Google made a major change to the way it indexes web site.

If You're Not in Google, You Don't Exist

About 2.5 years ago, Google changed the way they index sites and my by Ron Miller blog got lost in the process. I wrote about it in a post called Google Removed Me from the Index and It's Like I Don't Exist. As I wrote at the time, I watched as my traffic dwindled day by agonizing day until it was down to a trickle. It turned out that Google had released a new ranking algorithm, they dubbed Jagger and many blogs and sites were removed from the index. This change could have a similar dynamic, so you should test your sites to find out.

Google has been working on this for a while. It didn't just pop this out the chute to have a convenient answer to Microsoft, but the timing is certainly good. Google wants some attention and if you announce a new way of indexing on the world's most popular search engine, you are certainly going to get some. Just beware because this Caffeine could come with a kick so watch your web site and make sure you still exist.

jdas 0 Newbie Poster

>and we're not talking about buying On2 last week. That may interest some video geeks, but it doesn't warrant mainstream attention like say changing the way you run your search engine. <

Hi. The future of the web, as many will agree, is video, and the deal that GOOGLE is attempting to make by swallowing ON2 will change everything. As you know, video that had been exclusively the domain of TV is moving to the web. These videos all REQUIRE, no exceptions, a video codec, a way to compress and then decompress video files. This is tricky business as the algorithms used for the codecs are very complex, top of the charts. ON2 has a game-changer called VP8 which not only results in a true HD image on decompress but also saves enormously when it comes to compressing the file. GOOG wants this as bandwith on YouTube is costing them a fortune. Unfortunately, most don't know about this and GOOG know this and is offering a paltry sum for the company with the Master of the Universe technology. That's why shareholders are fighting back. They KNOW, while most of the world does not know. In addition, China has adopted ON2's codecs, representing a huge potential influx of revenue for this tiny company that GOOG would love to snag under the radar of Wall Street and some say the FTC and SEC. GOOG is not the good guy in this transaction as it is desperate to save money from its money-losing investment in YouTube.

Sincerely,

Jon

Techwriter10 42 Practically a Posting Shark

Right. I didn't mean to minimize the impact. I agree that video is going to be huge, but it really didn't warrant mainstream attention. When Google changes the way it indexes, that's another matter entirely and that's what I was trying to get across. Thanks for your comment and setting me straight on this one.

Ron

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