I have been saying for years that Google is over. Judging by the looks of disbelief I got from clients and colleagues, I realized that for 99% of the population my statement was outrageous! Heresy! How can Google be over? It is making so much money! It is so large! It dominates the Internet landscape!

That is precisely why Google is over. Here is the evidence:

Being the largest game in town, black hats need only focus on on guy to game and that’s Google. And Google is losing the arms race, it is the Elephant killed by a billion ants! The increasingly poor results served up on Search Engine Results Pages is proof. Every search delivers large spammy selections from content farms: broad shallow sites filled with vapid information. About.com is the most legit among the villains! (Shame on you NY Times Corporation!) But thousands of others are even more guilty: black hats hiring low wage/slave wage cut and paste workers copy information onto millions of pages so the site owners can sell Google Ads. (A shout out to a crowd of bloggers who since Jan 1 have been rapidly building momentum on this topic: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail, On the increasing uselessness of Google, Trouble in the House of Google

If you deliver spammy results you train your visitors to seek answers elsewhere. And as I predicted years ago, vertical search engines and upstarts are gaining ground. Bing delivers beautifully. Blekko delivers better. Wikki answers the homework questions. And when shopping, hell, just start at Amazon or Ebay and move on from there. Vertical social media and tightly focused message boards still deliver some of the best answers to questions asked and answered by passionate individuals. Need a special undershirt that won’t chafe for a child wearing a scoliosis brace? The answer can be found on a message board – because the brace company that sells it has been crowded out of the Google SERP by other inane sites all served up by our infamous friend GoogleBot who simply CANNOT differentiate between quality information and web trash.

Google stopped innovating long ago. We empowered Google by going to it and clicking on its ads. After their initial eureka moment, they bought all other innovations by acquiring companies. Their SaaS offerings of little spreadsheet ditties and social marketing confections are so disjointed and insecure they could pass as Open Source! My question is how can a company so big lack so much vision? Google is clearly distressed about this, note the latest change in leadership at the top. But going back to the founders is a mistake. Steve Jobs may have had the hutzpah to pull a Phoenix with Apple – but in my view that is a rarity!

What does this mean for businesses trying to be found?
1. SEO within reason, that means follow Google Web Master Guidelines, but don’t obsess.
2. NEVER, ever undertake an SEO effort beyond Google Web Master Guidelines unless it has an additional benefit such as lead generation, sales or enhancement of your web site experience. That way if your effort may give you a temporal SEO bump but it will also deliver a lasting marketing lift.
3. Create really useful content for humans. Understand WHEN they need your product and look for blogs and other platforms whose content is associated with that moment of need.
4. Solve problems where your clients look for solutions: message boards, blogs, user groups, associations etc.
5. When considering SEO do not ignore Bing or Blekko and others.
6. Beware of the Social Media sink hole! Where do your customers congregate? Go there. Just because “everyone is on Facebook” doesn’t mean your customers are there, or care to hear about you there. TAKE NOTE: If Google was over in my mind five years ago, Facebook was over two years ago! Vertical social media is here. But that is a topic for another day!

Happy Hunting!

I am on a hunt. A hunt for real numbers. Can Google, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook be transparent?

Print publications had this problem in the early days and so the BPA provided circulation audits. Yes media kits still whipped up the marketing spin, but as a planner you could lay those green sheets and yellow sheets side by side and make some objective baseline judgements.

This is not too much to ask from media companies today.

After BPA came broadcast and Nielson, boxes on sets reported back to the home office. Beyond that Nielson ratings were a bit shaky but overall, they provided a level playing field.

With perhaps the exception of Life Magazine, (and that is a stretch) no print publication ever came close to the monopolistic power of Google and now Facebook. Even Hearst, with all his power was puny by today’s standards.

And Broadcast bloomed and diluted into 200 channels in three short decades. But that was after the FCC came in and regulated local markets carefully limiting cross media ownership of local licenses.

Monopolies are bad for business.

Today we have ventured into far more dangerous waters. Marketers have become cheerleaders for the media monopolies that are frankly, stealing money from our clients — and frankly from all of us too.

Marketers have always tended to self-delusion and selling self delusion to clients. Those  of us truth tellers in this business are truly misfits. But when you work with a mid-sized B-to-B operation. When you are sitting across the table from the guy who is pulling those dollars out of his own wallet, if you want to earn his trust you’d better speak the truth. You and your client are on the frontlines. If you and your clients play in this very large slice of the market, you’ve taken your knocks. You can smell BS from 20 paces.

And here is what we smell:

Social Media is NOT effective in many cases, Facebook has not provided any answers on true activity. Who will benefit? Why we should buy? They have provided so many reasons NOT to trust them, their “auction” pricing is the least of it!

Search is no longer right for many companies — increasing cost is a huge factor. Google could help by making its auction far more transparent. When you buy shares on the NYSE you know the volume, the last tick — that’s the least Google could do. Who is bidding, how much and when? Why should I trust Google?

SEO has always been smoke and mirrors populated by hyperventilating “experts” who jump tag any twitch of the needle as a Google conspiracy. And yet, marketers are fixated by it! I was at a pre-Bing meeting at Microsoft. The guys there were promising a different sort of search engine, far more open. I said, “Really? How long will that really last?” Not long. It ended when we left the room.

When media companies are making what Google, Facebook et al. are they will never succumb to a tepid third-party audit scheme. Say what you want about Hitwise and Alexa they are not delivering what only the horse’s mouth can.

The only way to get what we need is with swift and sharp government regulation — don’t hold your breadth.

In the meantime what do the truth tellers do? They find their client’s True North. Judiciously, with care, testing, analyzing, tweaking programs and never, ever, following the marketing lemmings.

I have been a huge proponent of Bing — amazing since I will eternally despise Microsoft for inflicting impossible inelegant kloogy software on all us worker bees. But Bing is the one thing Microsoft has done right. It is the National Geographic of the 21st century. Breathtaking in both aesthetics and usefulness. Useful that is if you use it to buy plane tickets (love that buy-o-meter!) or shop for the lowest prices.

Its major failing has been search. Bing’s search simply has not been as granular as Google’s.  Today’s new announcement will help: Bing will start including status updates from Facebook. Even though most FB updates are drivel, many retailers are now actively using FB for promotions so this will help shoppers for one, but it will also fill out the Bing search experience with more rich media content among other things.

It is high time that Google had a tough competitor and if Bing stays on top of the improvements small advertisers may see some relief. Click inflation, the relenting up tick in Google CPCs is absolutely killing small businesses and businesses selling products at lower price points. If Bing becomes a contender in search we will see Google blink and start to offer more promotions to small advertisers. I believe that Google loyalty is eroding and I predict the tipping point for Google is well inside five years. FB has already surpassed it. And Google’s chronic lack of positive user experience (it should not take 200,000 answers for one stupid question) has trained users to go elsewhere: Wikipedia, Amazon…and Bing.

For at least five years have been writing and talking about how search will eventually move to vertical portals. It is official, it has.

I was speaking to a family member. A savvy young woman in her early 40s who I would call an average computer user. Her work does not keep her at her screen 10 hours a day, in fact she uses her computer to augment her work and to support her personal needs (kids’ homework, occasional shopping, email etc). The rest of the time she works face-to-face with retail customers.  Here is what she said, “I hate Google, because when I go there to help my kids on their homework I just get shopping information. I don’t want to buy, I want to know. I use Wikkipedia.”

And there you have it. A regular Joe/Josephine who has discovered that there are other more effective places to get answers than Google. Google will go the way of the IBM. Too big, too cumbersome, too out of touch. Too worried about being gamed on a meta scale to deliver anything relevant on the user scale.

Enter Bing. A compelling hybrid. Ironically this Microsoft product learned a lesson from Apple: Beautiful to look at, solving a chosen group of user needs. It is clear that the folks at Bing asked themselves: what do users use search engines for most? The answer: Entertainment, News, Travel and Shopping. “Let’s place ourselves there in a most aesthetically pleasing and robust manner.” Bing will become the go-to consumer search site. But don’t go there to research your term paper, or to conduct any other type of muscular search. It just won’t return good information. And the truth is, neither does Google. It is only slightly better than Bing in that department. Doing robust deep research still involves endlessly long search phrases and serious poking around over an extended period of time.

We are actively engaged in researching new technologies here at Camarès and we are finding that it can take weeks and hundreds of searches on Google alone – never mind Wikkipedia, YouTube and other engines. Invariably we find our answers nested deep in blogs that are linked to each other and NOT as a direct result of a Google or Bing search. Our Josephine described the essence of the problem: “Half the time I don’t know the right question to ask.” Well the truth is she does know the right question and so do we at Camarès, it is the engines themselves that are not indexing information in a way that humans actually search for it. I call this the Nuance Gap. Humans are nuanced, search engines are not. And it is the one place that Google has consistently failed the user since day one.

Until Google bridges this gap (and my bet it will never, ever be able to do this) it will die a slow twisting death, nibbled away by more compelling vertical competitors. Right now it is skating on its huge cash reserves and the fact that companies are willing to auction up the price of keywords beyond anything that is affordable. It is also skating on all the other Joes & Josephines who have not yet changed their behavior, but will over time.  Traffic will diminish – in fact it already is. Right now, Google may simply be calling it “market saturation” but if it were doing its job right, it would have out Binged, Bing a long time ago.

Sometimes a great lunch with a colleague with whom you’ve shared life in the trenches brings things into focus. Missa Goehring – a member of the Web marketing vanguard – and I were talking about an antidote for my general crankiness about things web – especially how hype simply blinds business people causing them to waste countless hours on useless online endeavors. Missa (like Denise) recommended that I consider more uplifting blog posts. And as if to reinforce their point I happened to run into a White Rabbit walking down an empty 6th Avenue as I made my way back to my car…

So through Deb’s looking glass folks! Here are my top picks for things fabulous on the web:

Facebook Advertising: Yes, you heard it here, I actually like the ads. And so does Missa who enthusiastically told me it delivers ads that mean something to her. I agree! Proof point: I just discovered Gardener’s Index a social media site for rabid gardeners like, well, me. How? A targeted Facebook ad got me there.

YouTube: Now a more mature platform, passionate communities are forming around special interest film and video. I am considering giving up Cable TV all together. YouTube offerings are far more compelling. Even those that you think would not interest me like Lauren Luke the eye shadow queen. Proof? For a person who never wear’s eye shadow, I find her delightfully authentic and very watchable. Or better yet, the fabulous Italian music group Audio Toys’ Time (not a Bohemian Rhapsody by the Muppets) who had the moxie to “Miss” piggy back on the Muppets’ Bohemian Rhapsody success and gain exposure. Bravo Muppets! Bravo Audio Toys!

Bing: Now why would I, hater of all things Microsoft, have anything nice to say about them? Because they FINALLY  created something that is not only useful, it is beautiful! They actually reached my satisfaction bar, and let me tell you, in case you haven’t already guessed, that is tough to do. A team over at Microsoft sat down and said: What do users use search engines for most? Let’s deliver it to them in a clean, fully thought through, intuitive, aesthetically FABULOUS way. Buying something, or selling something? Check out cash back gleams. BING! Shopping for airline tickets? Watch how they tell you when you will most likely get the lowest price. BING! News search: their Universal Search pages are fabulous with their glide over videos. Their Visual Search, is a knock out. BING!

How does that impact your business? If you are considering search, look at Bing, if you are looking for cost effective targeted advertising look at Facebook and if you have something to SHOW visually, a story to tell, you may find your most influential Passionistas on YouTube.

Oh yeah, and then there was the White Rabbit…he was advertising Wonderland’s Most Wanted: alice a Syfy TV event Sunday Dec. 6 check the really cool web promo.