On Friday the 4th annual DANI Awards took place, celebrating the best in the digital industry in Northern Ireland. For me the awards are one of the highlights of the year, where so many of my friends and colleagues in the local digital industry get together to have a great time. This year it was extra special for me, as I was shortlisted for the final award to be handed out that evening: Digital Industries Person of the Year. It was between myself, Louise McCartan from Search Scientist, and Victoria Hutchinson from Ardmore. As you can deduce from my smug grin on the following photo, I won. Photo credit: Darren Kidd / Press Eye Being awarded such recognition for what I love doing is pretty awesome, but – as with everything in life – it’s never a purely self made achievement. In my 17 years of working in the digital industry, so many people have helped me out and given me such great support, advice, and opportunities, it would be impossible for me to thank them all. Nonetheless, whilst commiting the unforgiveable sin of leaving out so many that should be mentioned, I do want to highlight a few people who’ve been there for me over the years and without who I’d never have come this far. First and foremost I want to thank the team – past and present – at The Tomorrow Lab and the Pierce Partnership who are arguably the best collection of industry experts out there and who I’ve enjoyed working with immensely. Next a big shout out to everyone involved in the Digital Exchange networking group, who’ve had to endure more than a few of my rants, and who welcomed this vocal and slightly obnoxious immigrant warmly in to their midst. The lovely folks from the Ulster University‘s DMC programme, you’re all awesome and it’s my honour and privilege to contribute, however modestly, to the education of the next crop of digital marketing superstars. There’s so many more to mention, but the list would go on forever and I’d still manage to leave out names that deserve thanks, so I’ll just conclude with the most important people in my life: my friends who keep me honest, my family – Mom, Dad, Marlies, Monica, and Jackson – who always got my back, and my wife Alison, who is the reason for everything I do. Ever since I arrived here a bit more than five years ago, Northern Ireland has been incredibly welcoming and kind to me. This wee country punches way above its weight, and I’m immensely proud to call it my home. Northern Ireland has brought out the best in me, and I’m nowhere near done yet. :) Onwards and upwards!

As part of the ongoing battle between Google and EU regulators, Eric Schmidt published an open letter on the Google Europe blog arguing that Google is built for users first, not for publishers. Ignoring the blatant lie in that statement – nowadays Google is built first and foremost for advertisers, their only real customers – if we take Schmidt’s statement at face value, it’s a horribly naive position for them to adopt. In most industries, putting users first is perfectly sensible. Manufacturers especially should always take their users best interests to heart and design their products accordingly. Google, however, is not a manufacturer. Google is an intermediary, connecting users with information sources. And, as any intermediary, it has a responsibility towards both sides of their value proposition. If we take the examples of other intermediaries, we immediately recognise the need for these companies to perform a balancing act between what’s best for their users and what’s best for their suppliers. The Balancing Act Supermarkets are intermediaries, connecting consumers to manufacturers. A lot of supermarkets want to do what is best for their users – low prices – but need to balance this against the needs of their suppliers. If supermarkets like Tesco err too much on the side of consumers, the end result is a lower quality of product. It’s an inevitable outcome in their ecosystem, where continued price pressures on manufacturers urge them to drive down costs at the expense of all other concerns, which in turn leads to lower quality labour and ingredients, and eventually a lower quality product. The same is true in the travel industry. Intermediaries like Expedia want to offer their users the best possible deals, but at the same time hotels and airlines want to maintain a decent standard of service. It’s a tight balancing act, and one that forces these intermediaries to weigh the benefits of their users against the needs of their suppliers. In the travel industry, if there’s too much downward pressure on price, hotels and airlines can opt out of Expedia’s intermediary platform and try to win customers through other channels. This is a sensible option in many other intermediary ecosystems, which helps keep the intermediary platforms honest. In Google’s case, however, their near-monopolistic dominance in Europe ensures it is commercial suicide for companies to opt-out of Google’s intermediary platform. The resources required to win customers outside of Google’s ecosystem is vastly beyond the limits of most organisations. Google’s Unique Intermediary Economy On top of that, Google has a rather unique position in that it has free access to the source of their offering. Due to the free and open nature of the web, Google’s ‘suppliers’ – the very publishers Eric Schmidt is criticising in his letter – have to opt-out of Google’s ecosystem. By default the entire web is Google’s supply chain. In years past, the value proposition was clear for publishers: Google takes their content for free, and in return Google sends a lot of visitors to the publishers’ websites. However, increasingly Google has skewed this value proposition in its own favour. Instead of sending users to the publishers’ websites, Google aims to keep them on their own properties so it can harvest more data from them and use this to make more money from their real customers (i.e. advertisers). It is precisely this unbalancing of the ecosystem that publishers are riling against, and that the EU regulators want to address. The Wrong Perspective The problem is, at its core, that Google doesn’t see itself as an intermediary. Google sees itself as a manufacturer (of advertising platforms), and is loathe to take the needs of their suppliers in to account in any decision it makes. This is problematic on many different levels. First and foremost, if Google continues to deny its place in the internet ecosystem as an intermediary, it will continue to monopolise users’ online behaviour to improve their value for advertisers and thus secure their growth. As a result their suppliers – online publishers – will be forced to drive down costs, with all the negative repercussions. Many will go out of business entirely, which in the long run undermines Google’s own service as it will have less content to serve to its users, and the content it does serve will be of lower quality. And it’s not just publishers that Google is putting under pressure. Almost every online industry is already, or will be at some stage in the future, subject to Google’s ‘users first’ mantra when it decides it can offer a better service. We already see Google moving in to verticals such as local, travel, and finance. Eric Schmidt’s ‘users first’ statement is testament to the incredibly naive mindset that pervades Google. The company still believes at its core that it’s a small start-up, fighting the good fight against the establishment. This is profoundly and wilfully ignorant. Google has long since ceased to be a small start-up, and is in fact a monstrously dominant powerhouse capable of causing untold destruction to every industry it touches. The company’s failure to even remotely appreciate this fact should be a grave cause for concern for everyone that cares about the web’s egalitarian promise.

Arguably the most pervasive a phenomenon mankind has ever invented, advertising permeates every aspect of our daily lives. Almost every moment of your waking lives you will be bombarded by some company’s brand. And yet, advertising adds no value to our cultural lives. In fact, it extracts value. Advertising demands our attention when we want to focus on something else. When we want to watch a TV show, advertising interrupts us. When we listen to the radio, advertising breaks the flow. Almost everywhere we go advertising disrupts up the landscape and intrudes in our visual field. Advertising interrupts our lives without asking, and urges us in to buying stuff we don’t need. It has only negative value and contributes nothing worthwhile to our lives. Advertising Is In Your Head Increasingly, as marketers become skilled in manipulating the subconscious mind, advertising affects our very thoughts. We are ‘primed’ for specific behaviours through advertising. It ‘triggers’ us to perform an action desired by the advertiser. We are guinea pigs obediently walking through the advertisers’ consumerist maze. Even here advertisement is not satisfied. It wants to extract even more from us, and does so by harvesting our data. Everything we do that can be measured, is being measured, and subsequently sold to advertisers to ensure their ads are even more effective in making us buy stuff. Our vision, our hearing, our attention, our thoughts, and our actions – all are increasingly intruded upon, manipulated, and harvested, so that we can be optimised to become more efficient consumers and buy more stuff that we don’t need. Advertising has been tacked on to everything, everywhere, becoming an omnipresent form of cultural pollution. And in the past decade advertising has become the driving force behind one of the most important inventions humankind has ever achieved: the internet. The Web as an Advertising Engine The internet is, at its core, the most egalitarian system ever devised. In theory anyone can use it to their own advantage and help improve their lives. However, due to the encroachment of advertising, the internet is now just another value-extractor in our day to day existence. Every article we read online, every app we use, every website we visit – advertising is there, waiting for us, ready to extract our attention, manipulate our thoughts, and harvest our data. The continued development and usefulness of the internet is fully at the mercy of this foul commercial noise, ensuring that everything that comes next will be optimised for maximum advertising value. The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. – Jeff Hammerbacher Just look at the tools and platforms you use the most in your daily internet lives. When you Google something, ads are the first results you see. Catch up with your friends on Facebook, ads interrupt your stream. Reading the news, you truggle to ignore the ads above, below, beside, and increasingly right in the middle of the content you’re trying to absorb. Advertising is everywhere online, and ads are designed in such a way that you simply cannot ignore them. Real content is obscured by manipulative advertising and, increasingly, the boundaries between advertising and content are blurred. The Alternative Approach There are precious few exceptions. But those exceptions are worth pointing out. Invariably, where ads are absent, you pay yourself. Content behind paywalls rarely feature ads. Tools that require a paid subscription almost never dare show you an ad. A platform that treats you as its customer doesn’t want to annoy you, so advertising is out of the question. If something is ‘free to use’ it comes with a price of its own, and increasingly I find myself unwilling to pay that price. I’m tired of being interrupted, subconsciously primed, and data-mined. I want to be in control of my own mind, my own thoughts, my own actions. Maybe it’s time we stop being the product that’s being sold to advertisers, and start being the customer that get treated accordingly. Maybe then we can exert some control over the direction the internet is heading in. Instead of helplessly standing by as more platforms emerge to extract value from our lives, we can ensure the internet starts producing more systems and tools that actually add value. The downside is, we’ll have to part with some of our hard-earned money. This would then ensure the internet becomes more elitist, as the ‘haves’ would be able to buy their way in, and the ‘have-nots’ would be left out in the cold. Data Has Value But that doesn’t have to be the case. In his book “Who Owns The Future” Jaron Lanier proposes that the data currently extracted from us by the platforms we use, to sell to advertisers, should come at a cost for the extractors. Lanier argues that because it is intrinsically our data that is being harvested, we should be compensated for it. Our behavioural and demographical data has value, so we should be rewarded for sharing that data. Free use of a valuable platform counts as a form of compensation. If you want to use a platform for free, you can do so, in exchange for your personal data. If you want to keep your data private, you should be allowed to do so, in exchange for a usage fee. Those who can afford to, can pay for advertising-free use of the internet. Those who can’t are, unfortunately, free to be bombarded with precisely targeted advertising that will manipulate them in to buying stuff. It’s still a two-tier system, but a slightly less exclusionary one. Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for. At least until the very foundations of our economic model come crumbling down, and we’ll have to rethink the whole thing.

It’s not often I feel pity for Google. In fact, pity is one of the emotions I most rarely associate with Google. But sometimes I do feel a twinge of pity for their engineers and decision makers, because no matter what they do they’ll always be screwed. Take for example the travel industry. In a lengthy and heart-felt open letter, the owner of a small tourism company admonishes Google for pushing SMEs out of business by allowing Google search to be dominated by big brand aggregators: In its simplest form, it means the big bags of money control the opportunity not the product. You can’t necessarily find the right product anymore, you find what they want you to find. Google just facilitated the demise of countless businesses by search prominence on the main avenue to commerce. It sounds like supermarkets all over again, except it’s worse. I have to drive to a supermarket, but can see the other shops on the way, who interestingly are having a comeback for all these reasons. This situation is of course the inevitable end result of the manipulation of Google’s organic search algorithms. If a system can be manipulated for profit, inevitably it will be dominated by big companies who can afford to spend the most effort on manipulation. This is true for financial systems and commodities markets, as much as it is for Google’s search algos. The only way Google can level the playing field is to make their search algorithms smart enough to give SMEs the same authority as big brand websites, so that they can rank high for relevant searches. Google has been unable to do this, so they do the next best thing: they give small businesses an artificial leg up by introducing a Google-powered element of the SERPs that allows SMEs to claim some visibility on a relevant search result. This effort was called Google Local – since then renamed a few times, most recently called Google Places until a few weeks ago when the latest label has been slapped on it: Google My Business. The trouble with that is that it pissed off the big brand aggregators. Because it’s a Google-powered system that now pushes the aggregator websites down the search results, these big aggregators feel Google is cheating and rigging the game in its own favour. So the big brands combine forces, form lobby groups like FairSearch.org, and convince antitrust regulators that Google needs to be muzzled and controlled. Google simply can’t win. Either they do their best to give small businesses an advantage in search, and piss off the big brand aggregators, or they give in to the big brands (and the Pigeon update certainly seems to indicate that) and the small business owners are left behind. Either way, Google gets all the flak and none of the credit. I only feel a tiny bit sorry for Google though. Because after all, despite this hassle, they do seem to be doing just fine.

Not a week goes by when I don’t read a SEO blog or status update or tweet claiming that good SEO is all about ‘building a strong online brand’, or ‘using personas to target specific audience needs’, or ‘improving your website UX to deliver lasting customer value’, or any of those other vaguely worded phrases that make the author seem enlightened and operating on a higher level of SEO awareness. It’s all a load of bollocks, of course. At its core SEO is about one thing, and one thing only: drive traffic to a website through organic search. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but in the end the primary means to achieve this are to rank the website highly in search results for a range of relevant keywords. That’s it. It’s as simple as that. But admitting this means admitting that SEO is inherently an antagonistic enterprise that pits SEO practitioners against search engines. And increasingly, for a host of reasons, SEOs are unwilling to do this. Instead SEOs, increasingly calling themselves something else entirely (inbound marketers?) to disguise the fact they actually do SEO, are wallowing in Google-approved marketing waffle to give the public perception that they’re all on board with this ‘legit’ way of making websites successful. Because pinning your colours to the SEO mast and admitting, honestly and openly, that you build links to improve a website’s rankings in Google, feels a lot like waving a red flag in the faces of Google’s spam hunters. And that is a terrifying thought for many, especially those who have bought in to Google’s anti-SEO propaganda. But it’s a cowardly stance to take, one that has a range of negative repercussions for our entire industry. If we as SEOs want to escape the negative public perception of our craft, we would do well to be clear and open about what we actually do. Because if we can’t be honest to ourselves about the service we provide, how can we ever expect anyone to trust us? I don’t deny that SEO crosses over with a lot of other aspects of digital marketing, including social media, UX & conversion optimisation, web analytics, and so forth. But these peripheral aspects of SEO are exactly that: peripheral. We shouldn’t muddy the waters to such an extent that SEO becomes unrecognisable for ourselves as well as for our clients. Our fear of the Google penalty hammer should not lead us down a path of ambiguity and obtuseness. If anything, our fear of Google’s wrath should encourage us to be smarter, to work harder, and to be clearer and more transparent to our clients as well as among ourselves. Only by making it very clear what we do and how we do it can we hope to win over clients and dispel the shadows surrounding our industry. Only then can we take the fight to Google, instead of living in fear. I don’t want to be one of those SEOs that cowers in the corner, hiding what they do and pretending it’s not really SEO. And I reckon you don’t either.

Google, by way of John Mueller, said yesterday it’ll be killing off the rich author snippet in search results. The author snippet, enabled by implementing rel=author tags on your content, gave you a rich search result showing your Google+ profile photo and circle count: This snippet will now disappear, apparently because Google wants to “clean up the visual design of our search results”. Since the entire SEO community has spent considerable amount of effort the last year or two to get clients to adopt rel=author precisely to get these rich snippets, I want to extend my sincere fuck you’s to Google for this move. Fuck you very much. But we really shouldn’t be surprised. After all, despite abundant claims to the contrary, Google+ as a social sharing platform is, as TechCrunch put it, ‘walking dead‘. This author snippet removal is just another nail in Google+’s coffin. Yet many SEOs continue to adhere to the view that Google+ is here to stay, despite all the writing on the wall. The thing is, the way these SEOs frame the debate, they’re right. Because certain aspects of what the Google+ name stood for will definitely stick around. You see, Google+ is not just the social sharing platform – it’s what most of us think of when we say ‘Google+’, but it’s only a small part of the amalgamation of systems and services that Google smashed together to make the lovely fragrant potpourri that Google+ is. After all, Google+ starts with having a Google account. If you have a Google account, any Google account on any of Google’s platforms, you are in effect a Google+ user. And since Google accounts are most assuredly not going to disappear, these Google+ fanboy SEOs claim that Google+ is a massive success. It doesn’t take a genius to spot the flaw in that argument, of course. No matter how you twist it, Google+ as a social platform is a disaster. So when we talk about the ‘death of Google+‘, we mean the demise of that social platform. No amount of  moving the goalposts is going to make that any less true. But since SEOs hate to be proven wrong, the goalposts will continue to move, and Google+ will continue to be redefined and reshaped in the collective minds of the fanboys, so that they can claim they were right all along and Google+ is here to stay. Because SEOs are never wrong, you see. Even when they are.

A few interesting bits & pieces have been doing the rounds recently. First the rumour, already going since May, that Google is thinking of offering a content management system to media companies that would combine editorial and advertising functionality in one platform: Beginning in 2013 Google started talks with some big publishers about offering software to help manage content and advertising in a holistic way, multiple sources said. This content management system would make it much easier for media companies – news websites et al – to combine management of various different features that are essential to their online business currently handled by different platforms: If and when the CMS becomes reality, the product would tie in to Google’s publisher-facing ad stack including its DoubleClick for Publishers ad-management tools and its yield management capabilities acquired via AdMeld, now housed within DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Other likely functions include integrated paywall support, commerce features, content recommendation links and plugins to ad sales-management tools. Obviously Google is not happy to just let news websites enjoy all the traffic they’re getting, especially that juicy ad revenue they’re earning off the back of that traffic. Google wants a share of that pie too, as its own monopolistic stranglehold on web search is insufficient to satisfy the eternal hunger for shareholder profit growth. Also, a Google-developed CMS would of course ensure that all content published through this CMS is perfectly indexable and understandable for Google, so that it can repurpose that content for its own benefit – such as in-SERP answers, ensuring users stay on Google’s own properties and give Google more user behaviour data and earn them more ad revenue. Thanks, Google! Too bad, Daily Mail! If I ran a content publishing website, I would be very hesitant to run it off of a Google-powered CMS. One of the key mantras of effective digital marketing is diversification – i.e. don’t put all your eggs in to one basket. By building a website on Google’s platform, you are essentially enslaving your entire business’s success to Google’s fickle whims. And with Google’s history of pulling the plug on popular services, this would be a very risky move indeed – aside even from the questionable decision to give Google full back-end access to your editorial content and advertising systems. Such a level of control could very easily be abused for the purposes of, say, a Filter Bubble. Google Domains News websites are only a small slice of the web nowadays – smaller and smaller as Google continues stealing their traffic – so a CMS focused on media companies would not suffice for Google’s quest to total World Wide Web domination. Enter Google Domains, a new domain registration service from Google currently in private beta. Google Domains is basically a domain registration service sprinkled with Google’s magic brand power fairy dust. It offers the same functionality as most registrars, including email, redirection, subdomains, etc. Of course all this will run on Google’s own computing infrastructure, ensuring you will have state of the art technology powering your web presence! As a side benefit, Google will get access to all four layers of your online presence. Small price to pay for such superb service, right? Google Domains will also connect to a number of content management systems to run your website on, including Shopify, Weebly, and Wix. Expect more platforms to be added to that list (maybe even Google’s own CMS?) as Google Domains grows in popularity and everyone wants to get on board the unstoppable Google World Wide Web Domination train. These are all just more small pieces of the big puzzle Google is building. Not content with being synonymous with online search, Google fully intends to become synonymous with the web in its entirety. Welcome to the future. Welcome to the Google-Shaped Web.

I first learned about Toxoplasma a few years ago on the blog of Peter Watts, author of my favourite SF novel of all time (‘Blindsight’, which also features what is arguably the scariest and most plausible concept of vampirism). Reading about this parasite made me feel distinctly uncomfortable, as chances are I am one of the multitude of infected people, and my own behaviour may be subtly altered by this lifeform’s effects on my brain. So when I sat down to write my presentation for SAScon 2014 about how Google’s webmaster recommendations are subtly altering our online behaviour to conform to Google’s desires, the analogies with Toxoplasma quickly came to mind. Here’s how it goes: The Toxoplasma gondii parasite is a lifeform that reproduces primarily in cats. When it has infected a rodent, it will settle in the infected host’s brain, and subtly alter the rodent’s behaviour. Rats and mice that are infected by Toxoplasma Gondii will become more active, less social, and more likely to take risks and explore open areas. Rodents will also often be attracted to the scent of feline urine. This of course leads to a higher risk of being eaten by cats – which is exactly what the parasite wants, because it can only reproduce in the body of a cat. Toxoplasma gondii This is akin to how Google works on the world wide web. Google is the first truly dominant search engine in the western world. Because everyone wants to rank high in Google and get all that juicy traffic, we will do whatever we can to please Google and follow their guidelines and recommendations. Google has realised that having this army of webmasters following its every whim can be quite useful. So, what is Google doing with this incredible amount of influence over the world wide web? Google makes a lot of recommendations about how websites should be built and structured, and the technology that should underpin every website. Google also makes very clear with it doesn’t like, things it doesn’t want you to implement. Most of Google’s recommendations and guidelines are in fact good for user experience. There’s no denying that, overall, many of Google’s recommendations make for a better web. But there are also a number of recommendations that help no one but Google itself. Things that make it easier for Google to crawl and index the web. And these recommendations are the ones we see more and more of. Google recommendations for better websites Take the recommendations highlighted above. They have nothing to do with improved UX, and everything to do with making Google’s crawlers and indexers run a bit more efficiently and give Google greater access to the information you publish online. But these recommendations, intended to help Google, have an unfortunate side effect. It means that instead of Google adapting to the way the web is evolving, Google is in fact restricting the evolution of the web. Google’s enormous influence on the web means that websites will try to conform to Google’s framework, and that results in a web that is shaped how Google wants it. Google is the cat here, and the recommendations it makes in its webmaster guidelines and Matt Cutts videos are the memetic parasites that it uses to infect us. When we are infected by Google’s parasitical recommendations, we will alter our behaviour – i.e. our websites – to conform to Google’s wishes and make our information more accessible, easier to crawl and index and for Google to make sense of. This in turn fuels Google’s ecosystem, enabling Google to take over interesting and profitable niches (travel, finance, knowledge, local, etc.) and grow its profits. Toxoplasma Google The end result is a World Wide Web that, instead of an open platform for innovation, mirrors Google’s desires: the Google-Shaped Web. This Google-shaped web allows the search engine to exert an enormous amount of control over the direction the web is heading in, ensuring it’ll maintain its dominant position indefinitely. We will never see a new rival service rise and supplant Google – in a Google-shaped web, competitors will be choked to death or bought. We are stuck in Google’s ecosystem, and nothing short of drastic intervention is going to change that. P.S. There’s a good chance you too are infected by Toxoplasma gondii, and your thoughts and behaviour might be slightly different as a result…

Earlier this month the highest EU court ruled that individuals have the ‘right to be forgotten’ in Google’s search results. This means that any member of the public can ask Google to remove specific webpages from its search results if those pages contain information that is ”inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”. Of course this immediately led to outcries of censorship and luddism, especially from the usual Silicon Valley cultists that advocate transparency and believe privacy is an outdated concept. Except when it comes to their own secrets and privacy, of course. This commentary in The Guardian is one of the few pieces of constructive, balanced reporting on the whole kerfuffle. And this piece in The Register shows how a cooperative media is dancing along to Google’s PR song, resulting in dramatic misreporting of the actual facts. We need to keep in mind that what Silicon Valley wants to know about you (which is everything, everywhere, all the time) is not necessarily conducive to a free and open society. In the data-utopia envisioned by these Silicon Valley technology barons, we as the general public will be completely subject to the whims of the owners of that data. And the owners will be the internet giants like Google and Facebook and the advertisers they sell the data to. We as citizens will not own our own data. We will have precious little control over who sees our personal information, and how it will be used. In this post-Prism world, that should really frighten you. If it doesn’t, watch this talk: Now Google has begun to implement this Right to be Forgotten and has created a form that people can use to request webpages to be removed from European versions of Google. This form asks for a lot of information, including a copy of the photo ID of the person affected. More than that, Ektor Tsolodimos discovered [Dutch] that the form itself seems subject to its own censorship in Google’s search results: it contains the noindex robots meta tag, and there is no link to it from anywhere on the google.com domain. So, despite a crapload of very high authority links pointing to it (787 referring domains in Majestic SEO, and counting) Google will not show the form in its own search results, no matter how hard you try. How’s that for irony? I can’t help but get the sense that Google, in typical fashion, is behaving like a spoilt 5-year old brat and throwing a bit of a childish temper tantrum about the whole thing. Not that this has stopped people from submitting the form. To date Google reports it has already received thousands of requests, so the company’s infantile attempts at obscuring the form have obviously not had the desired result. Rumour has it that when Google starts removing content per the EU ruling, it will make a statement to that effect in the relevant search results, as it currently does for DMCA notices: This is, again, done in the name of full transparency. And this, too, reveals the depth of Google’s hypocrisy. For example, when Google removes a site as the result of a manual penalty, no such notice is given. Apparently Google feels its own forms of censorship are perfectly legitimate and not worth pointing out. Google’s Sergey Brin has said he’d rather forget the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling, but I for one am rather pleased that the European courts are not slavishly following Google’s monopolistic hunger for more data, and is allowing European citizens to push back and protect their own privacy in increasing measures. Because if we don’t start to protect our own data, things are going to get a lot worse. Transparency is not the answer – it’s privacy that truly sets us free. Addendum 03 June 2014: What’s also interesting about this EU ruling, and hasn’t been highlighted anywhere in the media, is how it suggests that the EU courts see Google’s search results not as a publication of editorial content – a legal claim Google makes to protect its search results as a form of free speech – but as a gateway to information published online. This status of information gateway could theoretically put Google on a legislative par with internet service providers, and as such could subject the search engine to laws akin to net neutrality, as well as more restrictive antitrust legislation. Now there’s some interesting food for thought.

But I do know that, as an intensive user of the Internet, I get bombarded by them. End-user license agreements, privacy statements, legal disclaimers, copyright notices, they’re overwhelmingly abundant. And, as I’m not a lawyer, I don’t understand most of them. These legal statements may be necessary, but that doesn’t mean your customers will read them. For some companies this is exactly the intention as they hide oppressive terms and conditions in cryptic legalese. But if you do business fairly, you may want to consider putting a human-readable version of your legal agreement on your website as well. Creative Commons is a prime example of how you can make a legal agreement easy, even pleasant, to read. For example the Creative Commons agreement for this blog is easily read and understood. There’s also a more traditional version which you’ll agree is much harder to comprehend. So treat your customers respectfully and tell them in plain language what their rights and obligations are. Not only will this eliminate frustration at yet another incomprehensible legal statement, it’s likely to make your customers feel more confident about doing business with you.

It’s been a slow week as far as writing blog posts is concerned, and if it wasn’t for a sudden burst of inspiration after reading a book on poker I wouldn’t have written anything at all. The inspirational episode resulted in a post for State of Search where I draw parallels between SEO and poker. State of Search: How SEO is a lot like Poker Poker is a card game that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to win more money in a game than your competitors. Search engine optimisation is a profession that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to help a site rank higher than its competitors in search engine results. So both poker and SEO rely on a basic foundation of skills and techniques, complemented by a certain degree of luck. And that’s just the superficial similarity. It doesn’t end there.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 21 May 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.) Google seems to have a global stranglehold on the internet search market. With market shares ranging from 60% to 95%, depending on what country you’re in, Google is the preferred search engine for users from Warsaw to Hawaii. But there are some big gaps in Google’s global dominance. Take Russia for example. A Russian company called Yandex has monopolised the Russian internet landscape for years with its own Russian-language only web portal, yandex.ru. On May 19th Yandex launched an international version of its search engine on yandex.com. Search engine professionals around the world fell on it like sharks, trying to find faults with it. We search engine optimisers love to complain, and we were fully expecting Yandex’s foray in to Google’s territory to be buggy and flawed. We were wrong. As it turns out the yandex.com search engine is good. Really good. The results Yandex provides are amazingly relevant, accurate, and spam-free. It easily beats Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to undermine Google’s dominance, and might even be better than Google. Google initially came to dominance because its results were more accurate and cleaner than those of its rivals at the time. Serious internet users quickly adopted Google as their preferred search engine, and it spread virally from there. But over the years Google has kept adding features and functionality to its engine, which have ended up cluttering and distorting their search results. Add to that the pervasive presence of ads on Google – 99% of Google’s revenue is from its advertising platforms – and you end up with a search engine that perhaps has lost a lot of its appeal. Yandex seems primed to fill Google’s shoes as the new favourite search engine for serious internet surfers. Its results are clean and accurate and lack the clutter that has come to characterise Google. It will take much more than just a strong search engine to overthrow Google. But I for one welcome the added choice and hope that Yandex, as well as Bing, can nibble at Google’s market share. Competition is good for everyone.