All Google, All the Time (Yikes!)
Over the past few years, I’ve adopted a non-Microsoft policy. Instead of IE, I use Firefox; instead of Outlook, I use Thunderbird; instead of Vista/XP, I use Mac; instead of Hotmail, I use GMail. The exception is Microsoft Office, which continues to be a staple despite some looks at Open Office. It’s not that I don’t like Microsoft or its products; it’s more a goal to support rival services.
As Microsoft has been shunted to the sidelines, Google has grabbed more of the spotlight. My Google applications include GMail, Google search (regular, images, news, blog), Google documents, Google Calendar and, most recently, Picasa. It’s gotten to the point where Google dominates my online landscape. The question is whether there’s a danger about not sharing the wealth. As someone who likes to support the little guy, is it time to explore some non-Google services?
One service I’ve started using again is Blogdigger, a blog search engine created by Greg Gershman. I used to be a big Blogdigger fan before Google Blog search emerged. I’ve been using Blogdigger again after getting an e-mail from Greg that he’s coming to the mesh conference this week in Toronto (I’m one of the five organizers). It wasn’t just Greg’s e-mail that got me on the Blogdigger bandwagon again but my disappointment recently with Google Blog search’s results, which appear to be far from current or comprehensive enough. As well, some blogs simply don’t appear in the ranking. My Nortel blog, for example, is non-existent despite the fact it’s probably the only blog focused entirely on Nortel.
Still, it’s hard to give up Google services because they’re good. For example, I’ve used a number of photo-editors, and really been impressed by Picasa. One quibble is it’s tied to other Google services so you can’t use it to link with a blog unless you’re a Blogger user.
In terms of the search market, clearly more people are Google believers. The latest Comscore numbers show that Google has 50% of the market while Yahoo has 27%, Microsoft 10% and AOL and Ask.com 5% each. Don Dodge estimates every point of search engine market share is worth at least $1-billion of market capitalization, and then provides some eye-opening number-crunching.
May 27th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
What are you trying to do with Picasaweb and your blogs, Mark? There are a number of options for getting URL’s for the images to copy and paste into blogs, etc. You can even add a slideshow of the pics in your Picasaweb albums to your sidebar.
May 27th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Mark, WRT Google’s Blog Search - have you ever added your blog’s “Sitemaps” to their tool?
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
You can either do a proper sitemap XML file or they also support just taking your RSS feed. Since I added it to my blog I noticed it gets indexed much more frequently and reliably.
Often my posts will show in Blog Search within an hour or less of them being put up now
- Ryan.
May 27th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Funnily enough, I was just thinking about Google:
http://flickr.com/photos/dbarefoot/514759657/
May 27th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Google Blog Search has been highly accurate and amazingly quick in being up to date, Mark. Your problem on your Nortel blog is that you aren’t pinging a damn thing. Of course, Google or anyone else is going to know about your Nortel blog. Add ping servers to your wordpress admin and you’ll see plenty more results.
May 27th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Seems like Tom Keating’s posts were also not hitting Google Blog Search but then he got an email from a Google Blog Search engineer pointing out they had to fix a backend bug: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/google/google-blog-search-doesnt-suck.asp. And he is now back on GBS.
May 27th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
On your Blackberry go to http://mobile.google.com in the web browser and see what you get. (http://skypejournal.com/blog/2007/04/precursor_to_gphone_on_my_blac.html). Talk about being everywhere! They also have significant presence on the Nokia N800 with a Google Search widget and GTalk embedded.
May 28th, 2007 at 11:04 am
“I’ve used a number of photo-editors, and really been impressed by Picasa. One quibble is it’s tied to other Google services so you can’t use it to link with a blog unless you’re a Blogger user.”
Yes, that is a drag. A colleague and I actually discovered a way to hack Picassa to allow the posting of images to other places. Whether it’s legal or not, is another story. Hey, if enough people want this feature, maybe we’ll create a HOW-TO and a service around it!
As for Google taking over too much of your life, I agree that’s becoming a danger for many people. I’m not too badly off myself, having abandoned Blogger a while ago (it was just way too buggy.) I use gmail, but only to catch spam to my blog. The only thing I can’t really do without is Google search. For better or worse, I still use Safari, and I don’t know how (or even if) you can change the search box to use a different engine (how is it Apple gets away with stuff like this when *nobody* else would?) And even if I could… would I? It’s become a little too addictive.
A problem with “supporting the little guy” is that often that little guy gets bought up by one of the big ones and then you have to abandon the thing or learn to live with the new management. How long before BlogDigger gets bought by Yahoo! or something, for example? Flickr, Blogger, MyBlogLog… the list of former little guys is growing every day (and good on their founders, I suppose.)
May 28th, 2007 at 11:22 am
>> As someone who likes to support the little guy, is it time to explore some non-Google services?
Try Zoho, Mark
June 5th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Mark, I’m an engineer on the blogsearch team at Google. We looked into the problem you mentioned here and did find a bug. We fixed a bug in the part of our backend that computes pagerank. As a result of the bug, you were getting a very low pagerank. The blog was in the index, but was unlikely to rank well for most queries.
The bug is fixed now. As I write this, your post http://www.allaboutnortel.com/2007/06/05/a-win-for-nortel/ is the top result for the query nortel.
If there are other blogs you are having trouble finding, please let me know.
Jeremy