State of The Internet

Before getting down to the main business of this post, I'm happy to tell you that I can be heard making a guest appearance on the most recent Overnightscape Central podcast (here) over at the Overnightscape Underground, talking about Bob Blackman, the guy who used to bash himself on the head with a tea tray.  I know you apparently don't want to listen to me on my own podcast, but maybe you'll find me more palatable on someone else's!

But enough talk of my internet fame, on with today's musings on the current state of the internet (it's a bit like the US President's state of the Union Address, but rantier and with fewer implications for global affairs).  Now, I know what you are all thinking: 'Oh God, he's going to whine on about the evils of Google and how its algorithm changes have destroyed his traffic again.'  In which case, you'd be almost right.  I am going to talk about Google and its algorithm changes, but I'm taking a different perspective on them.  What if we were to take at face value the search giants' claims that its algo changes are aimed at cutting down web spam and low value sites in its index?  Has there been a decline in such sites?  Well, I have to concede that I see fewer and fewer affiliate sites, (sites set up to push a particular product, for which the site owner gets a commission for each sale of the product resulting from a referral from their site - they usually contain text designed solely to get them a high search engine ranking for a few keywords, rather than offering any worthwhile original content), and fewer and fewer of those 'get rich from the internet quick' schemes they promote.

Now, bear in mind that this is purely anecdotal evidence, based upon my own limited observations, so it may have no statistical significance.  Whilst this sort of site seems to be on the decline, I know that a lot of people are seeing what they consider to be increasingly poor search results from Google, dominated by spam and irrelevant sites.  The problem is, of course, that such judgements are entirely subjective. What I consider an 'irrelevant; or spammy result might be exactly what someone else was looking for.  Moreover, without knowing the entire contents of the whole world wide web, it is impossible to say for sure that for any given search query there are a 'better' set of results.  Sure, I know that you can run the same search on Bing and compare the results, but how do we know that the Bing results are 'better'?  We know no more about their algorithm and what criteria it uses than we do about Google's.  What is clear is that Google's results definitely seem to favour its own sites (YouTube, Blogger, etc) in terms of placings.  It also seems to favour the bigger 'brand name' sites over smaller, independent sites these days.  That said, the kind of results it returns are very dependent upon the kind of search terms you are using. 

I have to say, in the kinds of search terms that interest me as owner of a satire site, there does seem to have been a modest improvement over the past month or so.  It's not that there's been a vast increase in the volume of traffic I'm getting, (although it is up), so much as an improvement in 'quality'.  I've noted before that, back in the days when The Sleaze was getting big traffic, much of this was the result of poorly formed searches for porn, which, in turn, resulted in lots of visitors with no interest in the site's content who clicked on the one page and then left, (presumably in search of more porn).  Lately though, there have been far more visitors arriving as the result of relevant search terms like 'satire', 'humour' and 'UK political satire'.  These visitors are far more likely to click on multiple pages and stay on the site far longer.  They are also more likely to return at a later date.  Which is exactly what has been happening over the past few weeks.  As I've always maintained, I'd rather have a lower level of traffic generated by visitors interested in the site than huge traffic levels based on irrelevant porn searches.

So, have I suddenly become a convert to the cause of Google?  Well, not really.  Despite the improvement in the kind of traffic I'm getting, I still think that Google dominates the search market far too much and continues to abuse that position, leaving us all at the mercy of its whims.  There are still problems with the criteria they use for ranking search results - too much emphasis on factors other than relevance, for instance.  Worst of all is their obsession with using all of their operations to surreptitiously gather data on us - it's creepy, not to mention an invasion of our privacy.  Oh, and stop pushing Google bloody Plus - nobody is interested, we all recognise it for what it is: another data collection device.  Actually, Google Plus is symptomatic of much of the problem - it represents a further dilution of Google's core business.  For most of us Google is about search, not social networking.  If we want social networking we'll go to Facebook.  Whilst the demotion of things like affiliate and doorway sites is welcome, Google still has a long way to go to win back my trust.