If you read Perry Marshall’s newest blog post you’ll realize that Google starts to show more ugly monopolistic behaviour in that it decides by itself which industries it allows on their Adwords platform.
This means that if you use Google Adwords for advertising *any* business, you can never be sure whether you will be able to get traffic from them tomorrow, at reasonable cost or at all.
So, your investment of time and money in building your well-oiled Adwords campaigns may be worth nothing overnight, and, contrary to past Google-Slaps, there will be no way to work around it. If your industry is deemed bad by Google, and if Adwords is your only traffic source, this means Game Over.
So, we small-business Internet Entrepreneurs have to find another solution.
One solution may be other forms of marketing, but that’s hard and in many cases it’s not possible for a small business.
Another solution may be to create an alternative search engine.
This can be done on a shoestring budget if it uses computing power and network connectivity provided by many people on the net in exchange for a share of the profit. This can use a technology similar to SetiAtHome…
That’s already a serious technological challenge, but it looks solveable.
The real challenge is to get it accepted by the market, both by searchers and by advertisers. Obviously this cannot be done by advertising it with PPC on Google Adwords because Google does not allow to advertise competing search engines. So this must use alternative methods such as social marketing, viral marketing, writing press releases for getting the media involved etc etc etc
But I guess that it’s about time.
We cannot tolerate to have just one single source for the most important traffic for building businesses nowadays, i.e. Pay per click from search.
You might say that there are still Yahoo and MSN. They could be a viable competition but these companies don’t seem to get it. They look more like big buerocratic behemoths who try to play catchup but have shut down their own creativity completely.
If you want to compete with Google, you have to be more creative than them and be more connected to the market than them, not just copying what you see on the surface of their business. The surface of their business is just 10% of their business. If no own creativity is involved, then you are doomed to failure by just copying 10% of their business.
My guess is that if some search engine succeeds in competing with Google, then it will be something completely different from Google. It may look similar on the surface but everything else, the essential 90% which make it work, will be different.
My guess is that a competitor to Google with come out of a small business or out of a cooperation of multiple small businesses because that’s where creativity is concentrated. Big corporations like Microsoft and Yahoo tend to drive away creative people and tend to destroy the least bit of creativity in those people who decide to stay.
What do you think?
Please post your ideas,
Chris
P.S. It may even be me who starts such a competitor. Why?
- I have extensive knowledge in both marketing and computing technology,
- My businesses are still running besides an employee job, so I can afford the risk that Google shuts down all of my adwords campaigns,
- I have an education in computational linguistics, which seems to be a key technological ingredient for getting high quality ranking work.
Actually I have been thinking about such a project for a long time…
Now it seems that I have to switch gears to the next step…