Archive: October, 2008

“We don’t actually want you to be successful”, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt to a gathering of publishing executives meeting on Google’s campus earlier this week. According to the publishing industry magazine Advertising Age, Schmidt continued saying, “The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance.” Google has gotten tired of being gamed. A line from the AdAge article reads, “The company’s algorithms are trying to find the most relevant search results, after all, not the sites that best game the system”.

Because Google is the primary source of information for the vast majority of Internet users, it is the search engine most important to the online marketing industry. Even when Internet users are not using Google specifically, they frequently see advertisements from Google’s AdWords system applied to the document they are reading. Those ads are contextually delivered based on their relevancy to the content on the documents they appear on. Serving an estimated 75%+ of the information market and constantly introducing innovative ways to bring information and advertising to consumers, Google is IT.