GOOG
In-depth analysis and expert insight into Google’s products and services.It’s popular to cast black-hat SEO in moral terms. The popular understanding (made popular by Google), is that black-hat techniques are necessarily bad for the Internt, even if they benefit the spammer. That puts them squarely in the “immoral” category. But as this lengthy analysis from Aaron Wall illustrates, there’s another view: on all fronts, Google…
Google has just gotten slammed for apparently subsidizing a huge number of low-quality blog posts, all linking to the Google Chrome download page. Take away the Google brand name, and it’s a classic low-quality SEO campaign: each blog post sticks to a pretty simple template, and is clearly written in order minimize the amount of effort…
The Web and Consumption Equality
Andy Kessler argues that there are few material differences between the rich and the rest of us (or at least fewer and fewer). One likely reason for this is that more goods are either physically goods bought on the web, or virtual goods consumed there. The math of selling to consumers…
Quick timesaving tip: this edition of DDD Weekly will be abbreviated, but most people aren’t interested in lots of business reading during a near-vacation week, anyway. To save time on other sites, ignore any stories whose headlines include “of 2011″ or “for 2012.” These are uniformly filler.
Gogo files for an IPO
Gogo in-flight wireless…
Too Many Investors, or Too Many Powerful Investors?
GroupMe’s founder argues that more investors mean more time spent arguing with investors. That makes intuitive sense when you move from one investor to two. But it doesn’t seem to follow during an IPO, when a company moves from a dozen investors to thousands. The difference:…
Gowalla Update: Talent Acquisitions and Fiduciary Responsibility
Last week’s Gowalla acquisition illustrated another weird facet of talent acquisitions: the potential conflict that arises when a talent acquisition gives founders a good job, and investors a low payout. A Gowalla investor chimes in to say that, basically, he’s not upset enough to do…
How Search Engines Decide Whom to Trust
Bill Slawski does the usual patent deep-dive, evaluating how Google decides which writers to trust. As Google moves from domain trust to author trust, this will hurt the dwindling number of online media companies that rely on cheap, mass-produced content. (One surprising side effect: this will make…
Google Rolls Out Panda 2.5
SearchMetrics has the usual victim list. At this point, the results are pretty random. Google is probably identifying sitewide factors based on what predicts user behavior across all sites. Now that the obvious spammers have been hit, the traits Google identifies will be more superficially unrelated.
In other Google news,…
Meanwhile, at Google
Congress is trying to figure out whether or not Google is a monopoly. This is some kind of high water mark. They’re pushing Google+ harder than any product since search, and it isn’t working.
The basic argument is that Google has the power to make or break businesses, and they tend to…
Netflix Splits DVDs and Streaming
Netflix has split its DVD business from its streaming business, perhaps in anticipation of spinning off one or the other. In the announcement, Netflix’s CEO specifically calls out AOL, which is facing exactly what he wants to avoid: half of the business belongs in some kind of asset-stripping private equity…
Digital Due Diligence Weekly