Google’s Real Weakness

It’s tough to remember the Internet before Google. Page and Brin’s Stanford project only started going as “Google” in 1997. It’s used by so many people, it drives the web! As of Friday Google’s worth was $258.1 billion.

In the late 90s and even the early part of the aughts the Internet was young. Everything was new. There was little ten year old material online, because ten years earlier the web hadn’t existed.

Of course there’s more new stuff coming online every day right now than there was at the turn of the century. Unfortunately the old stuff is still here too.

Tonight I searched for ways to make money through youtube. Many of you have suggested I start a video podcast or some other online series.

I entered what I thought was a good search.

The first result (which looks kind of skeevy) had the title, “How To Make Money On You Tube (Tutorial) Not MLM – YouTube.”

It’s from 2008.

A 2008 tutorial for making money with youtube can’t be valid in 2013! The Internet has moved too far. How we personally use the net has changed as well. Certainly, youtube has changed.

I get this kind of response all the time, especially for tech problems. If I’ve got a hardware or software problem I need an answer that’s current.

Yes, you can go back and specify a date range, but that’s not what Google’s supposed to do. The whole idea of this search engine is to bring you the right answer the first time.

Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. – Google-“What We Believe”

This problem is steadily getting worse and will continue that downward slide until Google takes action.

I’m assuming they’ve taken no action, because if they have, they’ve failed terribly.

2 thoughts on “Google’s Real Weakness”

  1. I can find stuff with Google that I posted online as far back as 1986. Of course, things were a LOT different at that point – it was a text-based experience. There were cool freeware programs to download from the Simtel20 file repository in New Mexico on the arpanet, and there were Usenet news groups to provide some community.

    Things have changed a bit since then…

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