Archive for the ‘search engines’ Category

Installer Terror with GoogleEarth…

Friday, February 6th, 2009

I’ve just installed the latest update for GoogleEarth. And what I experienced is almost a top 10 list on how to make a terrible installer. So by observing Google and doing the oposite you can actually learn something.

  • The “Download” button on the Google website doesn’t work all browsers
  • You don’t download GoogleEarth. You’re downloading a program that loads the rest. But the don’t tell you up front.
  • They don’t tell you how much will effectively be downloaded
  • You can’t choose the installation folder
  • You’re not told how long the download or installation will take.
  • You won’t see a progress bar for the installation. Just a useless animation
  • You’re not able to cancel the installation

Useless animation and no chance to quit

And the worst:

  • Google installs a background process running all the time without asking for permission or telling you about it. That fits my personal definition of “potentially unwanted software”.

Removing GoogleUpdaterService.exe

To get rid of the “GoogleUpdaterService.exe” simply kill the process and delete it from “C:\Programme\Google\Common\Google Updater\”

Is “nofollow” killing Google?

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

The nofollow attribute was introduced by Google to cope with the problem of spam links, for example comment spam in blogs. Links in comments should be marked as nofollow, thus won’t count for Google’s rating and thus would be worthless for the spammer.  That was the idea.

But it might backfire for Google. Nowadays you can find the nofollow attribute not only in blog comments, but also social networks, forum postings and in Wikipedia articles. (It’s ironic: With Web 2.0 finally everybody could have his say – Too bad that it doesn’t count any more.) And with the spammers focusing on the sites that don’t use nofollow yet, these sites are likely to use it, too, soon.

So what’s the consequence?

By effectively abolishing the opinions of the small users only the website owners and journalists remain. Most website owners have their very own ideas about links: Their own products & services. And considering the journalists an interesting trend has evolved: Whenever they want to spice up their text with a few links for credibility, they link to Wikipedia. That’s easy and safe because they don’t have to check their sources for spam, fraud, etc.

The result?

Less diversity and less competition probably. The big fishes in the pond are bound to be the winners under these conditions. And Google is going to loose, too, because they’re missing the small, upcoming sites and trends. And just linking to Wikipedia instead.