The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Posted on August 20, 2008
Filed Under Business, David Waldman, Gogimon, Google, International, Internet, Israel, business trends, economy, financial, high tech, investment, investors, search trends, software, startup, technology | Comments Off

The SES San Jose conference which is winding down presented and discussed of some of the new search trends whether good bad or ugly.

The bad new is that since the American economy is mired in a recession, the internet advertising market seems to be shrinking a bit. There is less traffic, less demand for money oriented search terms such as “vacation” and for those offerings associated with vacations. This means even if a leisure site does all the right things volume will be down since leisure money is shrinking therefore people will not search for those types of keywords and the relevant services they represent.

The good news, however, is that Google still seems to be doing very well. Why is this good for anybody except for Google? Its all very simple. Google is the Internet in many ways if Google is making more money it means the web is till a place to make money.

And what is the ugly? There were major sessions dealing with click fraud. For those who do not know, click fraud is when an ad on Google or any other engine is artificially clicked by competitors or others that drive up the cost of those ads. The issue is a very sensitive one for the engines, as they have a clear conflict of interests in all this. Google and the others essentially make a large part of their income from the pay per click model and any fraudulent clicks take away revenue for the search engines.

During a session at the conference representatives from Google refused to meet with some click fraud experts. Google claims that it can discover on its own click fraud and compensate advertisers accordingly. Some independent click fraud companies completely disagree!

It has become abundantly clear to many that the internet is indeed evolving into something very different from its current model. The change is slow but the direction seems clear, as was shown at the conference in San Jose. There will be more personalized search and less dependence on links. At what pace this change will go is not yet known, but the direction it is moving in is obvious. If this is the future of search then Google will be there and probably in the lead.

David Waldman

[Mr. Waldman is Managing Director of Gogimon Advanced Search Channel, an Israeli search startup]

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