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(rt) If the latest InfoCommerce article “Google: Racing Towards Irrelevance?” is anything to go by, Google is inexorably heading down the drain like some of the worst-hyped Dotcoms during the Bubble. And it’s not as if they didn’t have a point.

Sure: advertising no longer tied to keywords – a return to the time worn, long ineffective CPM banner ad model. That’s not innovative, that’s retro to a fault, and nobody at Google seems to be either aware of it or to care. InfoCommerce summarizes it nicely:

Now, Google plans to enter the bazaar, offering graphics, animation and other elements that will let advertisers more aggressively clamor for your attention. In short, Google plans to become just like everyone else. Relevancy, the cornerstone of all its advertising programs, is now optional. After decrying the inefficiency of cost per thousand advertising for years, Google is now embracing it.

Indeed, the seduction of the gold rush seems to have hit the company big time. Add to which a generally dwindling focus, cluttering their offers with one seeming loss leader after the other: Blogger, Google Mini, Froogle, Google Groups, Google Desktop Search, Google Compute, etc. etc. … the list → goes on.

Comments FuckedGoogle’s admin on the InfoCommerce blog post:

The only thing Google has going for it now is inertia. And we all know how long that lasts.

Obviously, all this comes at the expense of Google’s generally perceived core business, search. However, this is where the critics’ reasoning seems fundamentally flawed: we contend that search was never Google’s focus in the first place. Instead, search was, still is and most probably will remain for the foreseeable future Google’s prime data conduit, the all-important base of their data mining activities which constitute the company’s real focus.

Yes, there is some (necessary) scope for experimentation and lots of beta versions: but what better way to tap the brains and ideas of thousands of supporters and businesses with a minimum of expense? Expectably, quite a few of these ventures will never come to direct fruition as future revenue makers. But they will significantly add to Google’s understanding of comsumers’ and developers’ makeup, qualifying their grasp of trends in the making, in short of the – very aptly so named – prevalent → Zeitgeist – a hitherto quite inconceivably precise and lucrative asset in terms of market research, consumer behavior, etc.

But beyond ROI, profitability issues, shareholder value, and other merely commercially focused considerations this approach is also perfectly in line with Google’s overly apparent ambitions at becoming the world’s #1 data broker – making it a patently political issue. Vide the recent lashback by EU countries such as Germany and France, attempting to counterbalance what is increasingly being perceived – rightly or wrongly – as yet another disturbing trend of U. S. cultural imperialism and a fundamental threat to other nations’ cultural and informational sovereignty, by implementing state sponsored alternatives to Google’s Print program and their very search engine setup itself.

Given this premise, everything Google has been doing so far, rather than being the hotchpotch of basically confused, aimless activities its critics make it out to be, falls in place quite seamlessly in an absolutely logical manner. Which, following Occam’s Razor, endows this supposition with a degree plausibility superior to anything the critics have voiced so far. Even though their basic contentions and anxities are, more often than not, right on the money when viewed in isolation, they do seem to suffer from an inherently myopic view which effectively invalidates many if not all of their conclusions.

Indeed, while we are actually fully on the critics’ side, we would submit that the real issue at hand here is actually far more disturbing than any of their contentions may imply.

 
Read the InfoCommerce piece here:
→ Google: Racing Towards Irrelevance?This is FuckedGoogle’s take:
→ Google risks losing its core search business

And here’s why we think that Google may be far more focused than both their supporters and their critics seem to realize:
↗ fantOpEd:
Search Engines as Data Gobblers

 

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