Google’s getting a lot of flack for a less than spectacular launch of the gPhone (Nexus One). I’m not too worried about that, I think they’ll get it working. I’m also still optimistic about the Chrome OS netbook – though if it costs over $200 I’ve got yet another public mea culpa waiting.
On the other tentacle, I am getting bad feelings about two Google services I have long relied on – Search and Blogger. I think the problems may be related.
Blogger is the proverbial coal mine canary. It is clearly not thriving. There’s still no iPhone or DROID app for posting or editing, there’s an undocumented and unfixed 5000 post limit, there’s no mobile-optimized version of blog pages, the BlogThis bookmarklet was never updated to support categories, the rich text editor has many longstanding bugs, there’s no spam detection on comments, the Blogger in Draft blog was silent from Nov 28 through Jan 20 (yesterday!) and so on.
Why isn’t Google investing in Blogger? My best guess would be some mix of
- Inability to manage Blogger spam blogs (splogs)
- High success rate of search index poisoning comment spam
- High rate of click fraud related to Blog associated adwords
- Low rate of revenue from Blogger adwords
- Declining readership numbers
- Failure of the confusing “Follower” and Google Reader note/comment programs
- Confusion from the rise of Twitter (confuses me too) and Facebook
Several items on my speculative list implicate search index poisoning problems. These “Search engine optimization” scams degrade search results, which leads to a spiral of click fraud and declining ad word revenue.
Which brings me to the bigger Google problem. The quality of the search results is deteriorating. On technical topics that I search on, I’m getting a large number of junk web sites. I have to use my Google custom searches to find good results. When I search on hard-to-find answers that I know I’ve addressed in my own ad-free tech blog, I don’t get any useful hits at all. It’s not just that I don’t find my marvelous stuff – I don’t find any answers anywhere.
In several instances, Bing has done better. In particular, Bing seems to find fewer splogs and fraudulent ad-heavy pages – perhaps because the scummy SEO gang is still optimizing for Google. (Bing’s time will come.)
Google is only as good as their search engine, and that engine is under relentless attack from the same emergent attacks that killed usenet and severely wounded email. At the moment, the parasites are winning – and threatening to kill their current host.
Google needs a winning response. They’ve got bigger problems than lousy phone service.
Update 1/21/10: See comments for a response from one of Bloggers Product Managers, it's an encouraging rebuttal. Per that comment I corrected the name of the Blogger in Draft blog; the official Blogger blog is http://buzz.blogger.com.
9 comments:
Great comments, much appreciated. I am obviously a blogger fan and I'd pay $50+ a year to keep my blogs going so it's good to hear some reassuring news. I think you ought to turn your comment into a Blogger Buzz post. I can't be the only concerned user.
Thanks for the blog correction. I subscribe to over 30 Google blogs, so its weird I didn't have this one. I swear I used to subscribe to it; it's reasonably active.
I'm relieved to learn revenues are growing, though that's not the same as saying they're satisfactory by Google standards. Growing is not the same as making targets.
The iPhone app got such bad initial reviews I dismissed and forgot it, but I'll take another look.
I wouldn't use the word "simply" to describe the undocumented 5000 post bug/limit. It's a royal pain for me.
I've tried the blogger in draft text editor many times, only to have horrible results when updating a blog post after initial publication. I'll cautiously try again, but Blogger in Draft Rich Text editor bugs have burned me.
Great news on the splog detection and pending comment spam fixes.
In noticed you didn't say anything nice about "BlogThis!". I'd love to have comments with that bookmarklet.
Yours,
john
Oops. That should have been "Labels with that bookmarklet" not "Comments with that bookmarklet".
John - Glad the comment was helpful, and that's a good idea about doing a variation of that as a blog post. I'll give that some thought.
Re: revenues. For obvious reasons I don't disclose actual numbers, but all the feedback I'm getting from senior execs on down is that we're exceeding expectations. Last year was the first year we made a concentrated effort to grow the business side of Blogger and it had tremendous results. This year looks to be even better (see the Amazon partnership as one example of what we're up to: http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/12/blogger-integrates-with-amazon.html).
Odd to hear about formatting problems with Draft's editor - it's pretty rock solid. Please ping me with any indications of what you're seeing - that's almost certainly a bug that we'll want to fix if it persists.
You're right, the Blog This! bookmarklet is definitely showing its age. It's on our list to get to, but not the highest priority (yet).
I'll update you on the editor. As I recall it came up when I edited using Safari on OS X, then revised using Firefox on XP. It was the old CR/LF, LF/CR problem -- made quite a mess of things.
Throwing WLW into the editing mix didn't help either.
Since I'd mysteriously lost my Google Reader blogger subscription I might have missed the Amazon announcement. I'll reread it.
Personally I'm not interested in making money myself from the blog. I do, however, want Google to make money from blogger so it continues to thrive and improve. So if you do write an update post, i'd be interested in knowing what I can do to increase Google's revenue from my blogs -- even if it doesn't earn me anything.
I'm delighted with Google's work on integrated translation services by the way. That's the next big frontier in blog authoring and reading -- cross-language.
I can't shake the notion that Blogger is the AOL of blog sites.
Otherwise, I'm quite happy with Wordpress's offerings. And it's nice that Google doesn't own *everything*.
The AOL comparison does sting!
On balance Blogger has been good to me, though if I were starting again I'd go with Wordpress. That wasn't an option back in the day.
I'm hopeful Google will keep it alive -- esp. since Rick tells us that the revenue picture is encouraging.
I did try the new rich text editor in draft.blogger.com, and it still has trouble with line spacing in OS X.
I've posted an example of the line spacing bug in the new blogger rich text editor. I'll send it to Rick too:
http://tech.kateva.org/2010/01/blogger-in-draft-line-spacing-bug.html
The 5000 post limit is not just a 'display' issue.
It means you can't search or browse for a post to edit one past that in the editor.
You also cannot export a blog with more than 5000 entries.
Far from telling you the whole story there.
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