Do you still need Google?

Somehow I am starting to feel about Google the same way I felt about Microsoft some seven or eight years ago. I once thought of them as a great addition to my professional life but then the relationship started to turn sour. Microsoft started the browser war with Netscape which wasn’t really nice and showed everyone how determined they were.

Google used to be a company that I looked at in awe (as in “awesome!”).
I got a call from our German office to talk about a PPC campaign for one of their clients and somehow this conversation triggered a whole series of thoughts in my brain that I’d like to share. Beware of the critical thinking.

We once lived in a world without Google. We used to somehow manage our ways through life without them. We shared good and bad (business) experiences across our networks. We used directories when our personal reference system was insufficient. Then Google entered the landscape and things changed a little bit.

Would a world without Google be a better world?
To some extend, we are all in the grip of the big G.
Headlines are becoming less creative since they need to include keywords now.
The quality of articles or websites doesn’t exactly increase due to the fact that they are getting peppered with keyword or key phrases.
I get the point if an important (or “relevant”) word is mentioned a few times in an article. Due to my understanding of how search engines work I get annoyed rather quickly if I see the arithmetic behind an article.

I am always asking myself: Is this article really meant to be or is it just another attempt of the publisher to gain more search engine presence? This brings a lot of skepticism and mistrust in my daily life that I am not too fond of.

Trying to find shortcuts
I understand that people have a problem standing in long lines. If everybody accepts to join the end of the line and wait for their time to get served we are in good shape. But if there are no standards established the system fails to work.
Example:
I’ve skied in the US and it works fine. People mostly stand in line. If you go to Europe you’ll find mostly chaos at the lifts. Everybody tries to get ahead of each other and it is rather frustrating.

That’s my perception of Google’s search engine these days. There are no clear set standards or rules that everybody would accept. Their algorithm is a secret and everybody is working on finding “secret” ways up the ladder (top search engine rankings that is).

There is simply too much content out there to oversee it all manually. Google still gets praise for the relevance of their search engine results. I am sure their focus on content has helped all of us to better understand how to create meaningful websites. Google definitely had its purpose. They understood our needs and catered to it (They are now more catering to the needs of their shareholders).

I am just not sure if I still need Google any longer. The web has evolved and in a growing number of cases there are better ways to gain access to valuable information.
RSS readers and social bookmarking sites have brought a new spin to the web.

• If I just want to surf the web I am not starting at Google any longer.
• If I want to know what other people have to say on a particular subject I will just look into the blogosphere, maybe starting at del.ico.us .
• If I need information on a certain subject I’ll use wikipedia.
• Etc…

I most probably won’t get away entirely without Google yet but I am certainly much less dependent.

Here is my point
I am just one fish in the pond. I know many others do think alike. If there is such a dramatic shift in sentiment, is it still worth to spend all that time and money to “optimize” (reduce might be a better word) your pages and sites for a potential Google ranking?

Isn’t word of mouth a much stronger tool? Might it not be better to focus more on networking instead?

I haven’t even started to talk about PPC yet. I think the nature of PPC invites fraud. It is a cat and mouse game. I am not a detective or police man. But everybody doing serious PPC marketing automatically turns into one.

PPC makes you even more suspicious about what’s happening online. I am suspicious enough already.

Notes
This is an article that you can obviously rip apart in many different ways. That’s why it’s labeled critical thinking.

I am still on a Microsoft platform, even though it is not pure love we manage to get along like an odd couple ;-)