Tech billionaire and NBA team owner Cuban must still be reeling from his Mavericks being ousted from the playoffs already. He's got a doozy of a post up on his always entertaining Blog Maverick site about beating Google the old fashioned way, by buying off their most valuable search results.
"How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively impacted?" he asked. "A theoretical maximum of 125k sites, but with overlap, probably closer to 100k or less, times how much per site on average?"
Cuban's post included the suggestion these sites dump Google's publisher network in favor of the one operated by whoever buys them out, effectively recouping whatever investment the rival site made to get those sites out of Google's index and revenue stream.
Per site, it could be a lot. Financially, a Microsoft possesses the resources to pull this off, but the real issue isn't the sites, but the searchers who expect to find the best results for a top query when using Google.
John Battelle flatly stated "no one would do it," as far as selling out and leaving Google entirely. He suggested Cuban should try the strategy out, since he has the money to do it.
Inertia presents the real problem in getting people to switch search engines. They use Google out of habit, plus the idea that everyone "Googles" anyway. There's no motivation to switch. People would just treat the next batch of search results as the ones they want and click from there.
"Time to go back to the drawing board on beating Google," Andrew Parker said of Cuban's suggestion. Indeed, it seems it will take a lot more than money to overcome the inertia that keeps people tied to Google today.
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Comments
Is this even feasible?
Is this even a feasible scenario if hypothetically all of the sites agreed? I'm assuming the actual process involved would take place within the robots.txt file, but couldn't Google simply ignore that if push-came-to-shove?
I guess what I'm asking is do site owners have the wherewithal to keep their sites out of the Google index? To what extent can this be controlled and what type of effort would be required to do it?
Thanks
Google here to stay
Instead of being obsessed about google... Microsoft and yahoo should bring us new solutions to enhance our browsing experience.
IMO google is here to stay for a long time, unless someone comes up with something really inovative.
Peintros
http://web-ebiz.blogspot.com/
Beating Google
There is an old saying in marketing "Build a better mouse trap ...".
I keep trying Live Search, and to be fair, it is getting better. But it is still playing 'catch up'. When a better search engine comes along - people will use it.
Like any business based on a technolgical advantage, the best way to beat it is to do the job better.
BTW - the first thing that came to mind when I read the article was 'Restraint of Trade' followed by 'RICO' -- but then I am not a lawyer.
Search results
With more and more people typing in what they are looking for directly into the browser seach,relevant domain names will bypass paid search and bring the customers directly to your site.
MLM Social Networking - another option but not a quick solution.
Word of Mouth Advertising has always been, in my humble opinion, and still is the best form of advertising. Having a product or service with frequent repeat business from loyal trusting costumers has always proven more successful than any other form of getting the word out to people of your niche. You are right about typing the URL directly into the browser. Remember when we used to type in www.Utube.com instead of www.youtube.com ?
Sometimes a company just gets lucky like that. Click on their link now and see how quickly they wised up and took advantage of all that free traffic. And to believe, they were at first complaining about the heavy load on their servers. You got to love this paradigm switch. Catch you later on Manly's blog. Have a profitable day. hard work pays off well. Smart work pays even better.
Build a Better Mousetrap
If you want to unseat Google, you'll have to beat them at there own game. A difficult task because they are doing many things right. Wait for a Google mis-step (not likely).
Agree
There is definitly a concentration of power that is happening within Google, they are becoming the Microsoft of the web.
how to beat Google
There is only one way of beating Google and that is to make them irrelevant.
This is how Microsoft have been beaten into being a desktop PC company while all the action is on the web,
You want to beat Google? Find a way for people to get what they want without having to search for it.
Maybe by having you own symantic search engine which only looked for stuff that was relevant to you while you were surfing other sites. You would then just click a button and all the most relevant sites would pop up - and you wouldn't need to trust a big evil company with your data...
There is money in this idea!
Interesting
Interesting idea. I love to think about ways to unseat Google. I am concerned about the concentration of power occuring with them. I don't believe wholesale buyout will work or would be cost prohibitive...but I do like the idea of incentivizing. My guess is that no one has overtly started that already because they don't want to get into a bidding war...in other words they are trying to win for "free" so to speak. It might be a hybrid approach that beats them...a shift in the paradigm for finding websites Plus incentivizing Plus something we don't know.
Google
Why is everyone trying to unseat google? Google has provided me with a decent living. Ok, ok...I know all of you billionaires that are trying to unseat google are really trying to unseat me. Oh my!
David
Spot On!
I'd have to echo those sentiments. Mark Cuban and his ilk want to muscle their products in front of mine. They've got the bucks to bully a little guy like me, but Google won't necessarily let them!
Great article
Thats great! Interesting idea, kind of ranks up there witht he " if everyone just didn't buy gas for 1 day" you will bankrupt the oil industry.
I know Yahoo and
I know Yahoo and particularly Microsoft have a lot of money, but what an ambitious, risky and expensive project that would be. I think Google is best left alone.
Me on Google side. We're so
Me on Google side. We're so confortable with this google.com portal that Microsoft tries to stop our confort? You must be kidding on me. Yahoo and Microsoft should hold their horses in their yards and... no flies should be allowed to project the "Down Google Tower" destination.
This is what we need ,something like Google, not Microsoft that all the time are comming up with their new OS (that all of them are full of bugs (and I've already paid so much money for so many OS, but problems still arrives)), nor Yahoo that except the yahoo messenger, does not have anything else that is for my interest (sincerely, don't even remember when I last time accessed the yahoo.com portal -except the e-mail stuff)).
Bravo Google with everything you do for us, for our needs and you're the BEST [sorry Microsoft and Yahoo, but you're good; just not enough]!
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