Do I Hate Google?
Given my track record some people might wonder: do I hate Google?
It’s understandable, after all I write things like
etc. all the time it seems. It’s true. I’m critical of Google.
Yet do I really literally hate Google?
Does Criticism Equal Hate?
One day I had a strange debate with one of the most renowned experts on Google search.
Later on this same person wrote a book called “The Sniper’s Mindset” advocating using sneaky killing techniques from the military for marketing.
I won’t go into details but he got angry with me for writing “black hat link building techniques you can learn from Google“.
His line of thought was in short “Tad is so anti-Google that he is too biased to make sense at all.”
Did I get a bad rep for being too outspoken on a corporation everybody still seems to love?
That’s possible. I also noticed that I don’t get featured in more moderate or downright pro-Google publications anymore.
You know, I mean the likes of Search Engine Land. Update: by 2022 I became a regular writer for SEL for half year.
That can have other reasons as well, my articles here on seo2.blog tend be a bit quick and dirty due to my workload writing for all the other search blogs.
You have to be friends with Google to be an accepted authority in the search industry for obvious reasons. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Cuddling with Google is for Big Publishers Only
Major publications have something to lose. They have to be friendly to Google to get the inside scoop.
They want to be able to get the latest news directly from John Mueller and other people from the Google team. Thus they can not afford to be too critical of Google like I am.
First off: I still use Google tools and services. It’s obvious. I have to use Google to improve client websites and make them more findable.
Indeed it’s almost the only search engine there is!
Other search engines are marginal by usage compared to the market dominating Google. I also use plenty of other Google services.
I don’t rely on them anymore but I use them as nice to have, after all they are free (as in free beer)
Thus in case they don’t do more harm than good I still use them.
For a few years I even banned Google search on my blog here.
Indeed Google did more harm than good so I removed access for Google bots here. I have explained that in-depth in the past.
I won’t explain it again what the reasons were and still are. I also have mentioned that I give each Google service a new chance.
You Have to Know What you Criticize
Thus it’s not hypocritical of me to criticize Google and use Google tools at the same time.
Indeed it makes me able to criticize them at all because I know what I’m talking about.
I also optimize client sites for Google so I still can share my expertise of Google SEO despite not using Google search privately. There is more to it.
When I first wrote this Google just turned 15 so it basically was a disgruntled teenager.
I rarely speak about family because I consider it a private matter.
Also I don’t like to flaunt their images on Facebook but I have a wife and what a coincidence had a teenage daughter.
My daughter sometimes said the same things a hypothetical Google teen could tell me:
- You are always criticizing me!
- Everything I do I do wrong!
- I can never make you happy.
Do I hate my daughter too? Am I the misanthrope some of you might expect already? No, of course not.
There are many reasons to criticize a teenage daughter you may imagine and in the case of Google there are a lot too.
I won’t repeat every time that she or Google does everything else right, except the things I criticize.
Of course a humongous entity like Google can do much more harm than my teenage daughter!
That’s why I broadcast my criticism of Google to the whole world while I only criticize my daughter in private. The situation is very similar though.
Staying Positive While Being Critical
When my daughter was younger me and my wife took part in a so called Triple P course. It’s the abbreviation for Positive Parenting Program.
The basic premise of this scientifically proven system is that most parenting (and indeed the whole society) is wrong simply because it’s based on negativity:
- criticism
- penalties
- anger.
Triple P in contrast is parenting by rewards.
You obsess about the positive things so that kids notice when they do something right and not the other way around.
Within a few weeks we achieved literately stellar results with our daughter. From several daily tantrums we moved to weekly and later monthly ones.
It wasn’t that our daughter was a bad kid, it was just that we sucked at parenting until then. It’s not always easy to abide by the Triple-P system.
When you’re tired, stressed out or frustrated for some reason (and I am lot, after all I stare at a screen all day) you tend to get overtly critical.
So today is the “Google didn’t want to kill me” day.
I will treat Google more like a teenager from now on.
I’m not even angry anymore that Google stole my Adsense money.
It was just around 100$ anyway so I won’t hate Google for that either.
I also like to apologize for calling Google a “corporate criminal” in the past. Even though it was true.
I went a bit overboard with that. I mean it’s true but still offensive.
Yet that’s just a small part of “the Google”. It’s not like their main business model, is it?
Google is Not Just a Corporation – it’s Made by People
I also know that there is no Google, there are tens of thousands of hard working people there.
They do not mean to cause harm. After all there are also much uglier corporations out there, think
- ExxonMobil
- Monsanto
- Nike.
Google for one has never polluted the environment at large scale, speculated on hunger in poorer nations or exploited slave labor.
I’m not a raging maniac who is hating Google.
In case you work at Google I bear no grudge against you.
You have most likely nothing to do with the person responsible for
- my Adsense money theft
- the half billion dollar illegal drug scheme
- driving website owners into desperation.
- profiling users and giving others access to those profiles.
You are just trying to do your job. Remember though that you can’t blame “the Google” for everything either.
You are responsible to some extent so in case you want to sleep well for the rest of your life you should rather listen to what I say.
Then Google might grow up to become a responsible corporation. Right now it’s on the way to corporate tyranny and it’s not difficult to extrapolate that future.
Just listen to your own corporate doublespeak and compare it to Orwell’s in his 1984 novel. I strongly suggest to read it in case you haven’t yet.
That’s a touching post, Tad. :) It tells a lot of your fatherly side.
I don’t hate the people who make a living at Google either. No, it’s the tyrannical mentality that I truly hate. If it wasn’t Google, but Amazon or eBay or even the small bookshop on the other side of the street, it wouldn’t be any different. Harmful mentalities need to be fought. You do a wonderful job at raising awareness in this sense.
The Google mentality is bossing over people’s freedom and telling them what to do, even when they don’t give a smurf about Google. Just the other day I removed all my websites from GWT. I still need analytics for SocialSpark, but for my own analytics I’m slowly switching over to Piwik and Open Web Analytics. Maybe one day I can get rid of Google+, too. Still had no chance to get rid of Facebook (too many contacts, personal and business, use it; and Facebook-only copywriters groups I needed to join).
Idolatry of Google is yet another issue. Hope you and I never run into any hardcore fanatics; they’re dangerous people.
– Luana
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Luana, I got an audience of 9k on Google+ by now so I’m afraid I won’t be able to get rid of is soon.
Thanks Tad for providing your different viewpoints in a fairly Google dominated world.
Funnily enough I’ve seen this article appear a few times in my feeds on Google+ by fairly respected people with large followings. Ordinarily when I follow these links and read the content there are quite a few comments at the bottom.
Surely people aren’t avoiding commenting because Google won’t be visiting to pick them up? Perhaps it’s still early days for the article’s lifespan? Call me cynical. Thanks again.
As a user / consumer I understand why Google is doing what they are doing with regards to crazy penguin updates and no-following (except for hiding referral traffic, I have absolutely no idea what that is about).
As an SEO yes I am very annoyed by this.
Not sure how many people watched basketball in the 1990’s, but Dennis Rodman was a rebel in the NBA. He hated the NBA, but he loved basketball.
I kind of feel like Dennis Rodman. I don’t like a lot of the “rules and regs” set forth by Google, but I understand them (somewhat) and I agree to play by their rules as long as I play in their playground.
Thanks for sharing Tad, I did not know about this site will add it to my repertoire.
@Tad – Yes, I know. I don’t have as many followers as you do, but I need G+ to work as a contributor to certain sites. Nothing I can do about it for now. :)
@Patrick – Google didn’t need to filter out “poor” results; all it needed was having a – say – “Top Results” index and then an “Other Results” subindex. Or even more categorization; that corp. doesn’t lack good brains to think up something smart. But they chose to go down the elite route and a user who may be interested in one of those “poor” results won’t be able to find that kind of result (I know, for I’ve always been one of those users in search; it’s never been only about big names).
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@Luana – do you really think that having 2 indexes is really something that the UX team over at Google would go for? I can’t imagine anyone saying “hmm, let me search the ‘poor results’ index to see if I can find some better information.
@Patrick – Maybe they wouldn’t go for it, but I would if I were them. It’s users who decide if a result is ‘poor’ or not, not the search engine, or there will be always some kind of bias. I think the main issue with everything we’re undergoing recently lies in the fact that a lot of people get their first computer and perform their first searches thinking it’s a magic box. Without a basic education… it’s tough. :-/
@Tad please keep the heat on. Maybe Google will actually listen and change for the better one day.
Emory, now that you mention it, they listen indeed, the captcha issue pictured above stopped once I published it on Google+ and it got pretty much popular for such a note. You have to remember though that most Googlers are just cogs in the machine so they can’t change top down decisions.
Hi,
First time I see this website, and as I HATE google more than anything else we could see in the Internet, I wanted to react a bit. And as I am french, I really know how to say bad things :) (but sorry for my english mistakes !)
OK this post will be probably a bit out of the true content of this blog and especially in this page, but I wanted to react on 2 sentences:
“…there are tens of thousands of hard working people there who do no harm.”,
“Google for one has never polluted the environment at large scale…”.
Google Servers are so huge they consume lots and lots of power, for what ? Google earth, Google StreetView, Google Ads ? Wow, so important that all this power has to be wasted for sure… Talking about StreeView, what a good idea “Hey people, we will drive in ALL road of ALL countries, in ALL world and take pictures (-and-steal-all-wifi-sessions-to-observe-what-people-do-, see French C.N.I.L. documents)”. StreetView is useless, fun, but useless and far much a waste of power for the service it gives.
Years ago, Internet websites had to send requests to appear in a search engine. It was free but required to registrer into a search engine to appear in it. And that was good ! Now, whatever website you host in your living room old computer to share photos with your familly is scanned by bots invented by… ??? Let me guess: Google (am I wrong ? I may, I cannot be sure of that, but it is soooo obvious to me). OK there is a way to avoid it, but WHO tells you that ? Your ISP ? Your computer ? Windows ? nobody tells you the trick before you got victim of search engine registration.
Only Google would have such an idea of scanning all public IP Addresses all over the world and recording all websites. Intrusive, we are at the very beginning of Google thirst of power (Streeview is an evolution of that). It wants everyhting, money is not important, it comes naturally when you have the POWER, when you RULE the internet. And the power comes by scanning, recording whatever you can, being the memory of the world, in every way, in every depth, whatever it costs. Many people say “Microsoft is the same”, ow hell No ! Microsoft creates programs and sells them. They want money, they want what all the other companies want, to work well and get money, that’s all. What Google wants is to RULE, to become BigBrother. And that works a lot, as everyone agrees with it. Who would have thought about a volunteered BigBrother ? A system where everyone WANTS to be watched on ?
“…there are tens of thousands of hard working people there who do no harm.”
No, they DO harm. They probably don’t know it as they are working in a so perfect company, with so perfect conditions, a true dream for everyone…
Now I invite everyone to use another search engine. OK it won’t seem as good as Google, but if we don’t use other websearch engines, they won’t be able to get better.
OK, I stop preaching :)
Please remove this post if you feel it doesn’t go well with your blog or this page. I just wanted to share that : Personnaly I HATE Google, truly. So much that I banned *google* from my computer. and that works pretty well I should say :)