I am in violation of Google's laws!

This is what I saw in the mail this morning:

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not

accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying

Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For

instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as

http://entrypreneur.blogspot.com/2009/11/catching-entrepreneurial-bug-side.html.

Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may

exist on other pages of your website.

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers may not display

Google ads on pages with adult or mature content. While we understand that

it may be challenging to monitor user-generated content, such as comments,

on your site, we require publishers to check that the webpages containing

their ad code complies with our program policies.

Please make any necessary changes to your webpages in the next 72 hours.

We also suggest that you take the time to review our program policies

(https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&stc=aspe-1pp-en)

to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance.

Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad

serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to

your account within the next three days, your account will remain active

but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note,

however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found

in the future.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Issue ID# 166xxxxx

----------------

For more information regarding this warning email, please visit our Help

Center:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=113058&stc=aspe-ai4-en.

As far as I remembered, I have not cut-pasted or written or even pointed to any adult content on the web, tho yeah, there's lot which indicates maturity on both the readers' and authors part. Obviously, I was a little flabbergasted. On clicking the culprit link, I realized there were some eastern-script (Chinese?) comments that I could not make head or tail of, and had never noticed, or been notified about!

Especially given that this is on Google's own blogging platform, does this sound like its fair ? Not from where I stand. For one, the algos could, and should, easily isolate the offending comments, realize its not author-originated, and maybe hide those? At worst, maybe send me a friendlier note about "Hey we've found some shady material from your commenters, wanna take care of it? Its interfering with our Adsense policies."

But no sir, I have been found in violation for someone else's actions, inaction and clearly no "adult" intent on my part. And if "further violations are found in the future" I will lose the privilege of using Adsense! And the huge riches - all of $36 - that I could accumulate from the same. I am terror-stricken!

Honestly, Big-G, this is a very very lousy approach to managing consumers/customers. There's not even a way of getting back to someone in there and clarifying! You're losing the mojo a bit, and this needs to be part of the reforms if you want that back. If its a "just machines" approach, sure we understand, but first make those machines a little smarter before you send threatening notes to users.

Aside : For the longest time I'd cribbed that most folks had a "we-re wrong, Google's right" if something didn't quite work out with using a Google service. A set of results that left one unsatisfied just meant we'd not framed the query well. People started to, and continue to, rewrite sites for the express purpose of being in Googles good books and ranks. Isn't that a little screwed ? I do see cracks in that mindset, and one hears f the SEO problem etc more often.

Google makes the right move: Aardvark!

I've been following Aardvark (and similar social search efforts) and in fact, had mentioned to someone as a follow-up discussion to the post that Vark would be a very likely candidate for a buy-out by FB or Google or anyone with an eye on the next generation of search. Bingo!

Of course, it would have been great if I'd gotten around to doing it myself, but thats the thing with lost opportunity :)

The Bing Thing

Microsoft is re-searching. With Bing - A Better Way to Search.

Danny Sullivan is partially impressed, but thinks they're positioning it wrong. Fair enough. But that discussion also brings up the usual question about who (or what - since it could be something they make themselves) will displace Google, or at least lower the following that it has.

My personal take is: the answer is multi-fold.

The Game You're Trying To Play Has Been Won

Because the current victor wrote, and continues to rewrite the rules.

• Every website tries SEOing - and that plays right into their hands.
  
• The reasons why people will seek alternatives will be the ones that break this vicious/virtuous SEO loop
• More people should be trying to be found *fairly* but its a mad scramble for the first 20 results of one site - and that serves Google's cause.
• Everyone's trying to be friendly to the Google crawler.

So..... ?

Generic vs Specific

Discovery is a major problem - to start with. For travel related queries (airfares, rentals, hotels), for instance, Google is often NOT necessarily the starting point, and certainly not where people spend too much time. Once they figure out a site they feel comfortable with for their particular vacation/trip/destination, their spend more time researching that instead. Trouble is, the latter is not a large organized set yet - and you keep running into different "important" sites with time, change of destination, etc.

News is another major area where Google is dependent on News sites, since it does not "create" news! Its merely the huge attempts at making themselves as easily discoverable on Google as possible that keeps Google News in business. News sites could so-very-easily establish an alternative for themselves, only if they thought it through and collaborated some.

Vertical focused destinations have a huge advantage of industry understanding - the "semantics", behaviour derived design and interfaces come for free! Google News is mere links - there's hardly scope for editorials, commentary - those often distinguish the great newspapers from the ordinary. The News industry, by virtue of being the producer of content, can do a much better job of a news destination. From thereon, its just a matter of starving Google of good enough, trusted news and commentary, and exposing it through an API at most. Make Google play your game, instead. At least the big guys surely can, while they still have some control over mass media and distribution.

Data is Key

And Google's just about scratched the surface. The deep web has an unfathomable amount of valuable, clean data. Yes Google is making attempts at a semantic understanding of what it crawls, but at the end of the day your forms are the sentinels of what you posess. As data gets deeper on sites, and forms get smarter, more interactive and un-crawlable, there will be lots of data that can only be co-operatively shared. Deeper data is also more useful for the end user (one of the points that MS has tried to make) and can be linked to actions that are relevant to the specific category.

Google's "control" over sites trying to feed its supremacy will reduce dramatically as and when a "co-operative" search engine starts attempting aggregation of deep data whilst not denying individual sites negotiating power for the data they own, its usage, and the actions that are associated with it.

Mobile

This is a completely new ballgame. Some of the above strategies will come alive here, and add to that a mix of the mobile apps battles in which operators, handset manufacturers and Google are all trying to establish control. One scenario is that people stick to a lot of individual apps on an easy to use platform rather than rely too much on discovery. Each app will need discovery within a particular domain or vertical, though.

Going back to data,its especially true on the phone that a larger index is not what interests folks anymore (iPhone or not - the form factor is still a pain, and user behaviour on the move is unlikely to be similar to what it is on the desktop). Smaller, cleaner, better categorized and graded indices will automatically help decision making, and users could choose the route of a "bouquet of relevant services" rather than a massive ocean to fish in.

SEO and the Tag Games

Try queries made up of common words (more so if they're of commercial interest) and your first few results - and sometimes a page or two of results - is all SEOed, not-necessarily-relevant crap. Yes, Google's trying to fight this battle, but the current algo is almost fair game and SEOing, which should, from a search engine's point of view, be outlawed, is a huge industry! All built around this one search engine. Its a cat and mouse game that Google's caught up in - and an case for a "SEO-bombed? Try the other engine" opportunity for engines which have a different algo, or solve problems in a specific domain.

My guess is that the current state and dominance of generic websearch will last at most for another 3-4 years. Indeed, Yahoo's continuously changing mobile search and Google's attempts at "injecting" results from other properties into the SERP are an acknowledgement of this direction. One possible replacement is a personalized swiss army knife of sharper engines - somewhat analogous to your bookmarks which continue to guide you to your frequented sites everyday. A tool-set of searches that serve your interest will be a wider set than a few sites and much cleaner, and more interactive (in terms of what you can do with the information once you find it). The interface for this is not too clear, and likely to be different from our current experience of the web. It'll need to come "pre and auto configured" for the less savvy users for sure.

In 2015, we'll recall amusing statements from 2009 about the state-of-the-art of web search :)

In a G Spot ?

Google advertised its SMS search today.

This kinda news always shakes things up for a small outfit like ours :) Its also a nice catalyst for a bunch of plans and certain points of views in stuff debated internally.

Most of all, they may help expand the pull-services-on-SMS market which may help us a great deal, indirectly. Out in the hinterland (where an amazing %age of our usage is from), "Google" and "cool" aren't factors.

But then its big-G, and you gotta watch out!

So far, we're ahead on the breadth of data we've got covered (tho they have some nice features pre-configured), and the community is an invaluable tool to leave the bother of figuring out the answer you need, rather than a generic "result", and always so! But then, G can always catch up on this, that and everything else - I mean it just takes money and developers with brains, plus some time, and they have bigger advertising moolah (actually, just plain old moolah) than we do.

This is exactly what makes doing startups so much fun :D Spotting a future challenge/opportunity and donning the thinking cap on for the battles.

Its an even field, and we have a head start. The huge question is - how does a startup with a very limited marketing/publicity budget stay ahead? Of course its for us to figure out, and sure we'll be stretching our grey matter as best as we can, but if someone has a great idea or two, the coffee on us while we discuss it :)

BTW, we have a decent TT table in office if you'd rather play a game, instead. Drop by....

Context, Semantics, Scary!

Thats got to be one of the better takes I've seen on the machines taking over ;)