that we had filed on this new type of search engine all of a sudden became very important. It was serendipitous that 3 years earlier, we had created our own search engine to discover the connections between changes to a website and Google’s results. With this new “Google Simulator”, we could easily remove the query layer of the search engine – all of the “personalization” that, in effect, was causing a tremendous amount of noise for brands (trying to understand what was going on inside of Google). Of course, the only way to remove this query layer was to start from the ground up – you had to build your own search engine.
More, More, More Profit! You have to understand one thing about shareholders. Not every shareholder starts at the beginning with you. And some of the biggest shareholders might just be the newest ones. It is for this reason that shareholders DEMAND that revenues and profit grow each quarter, even if the last quarter was the best ever. If they don’t get that…well…then they invest in your competitors who WILL grow revenues each quarter (no matter what). There was only one problem. At this point, Google had already doubled-down on its AdWords system, increasing its marketplaces by
personalizing results. And remember, even after a decade, Google still relied almost entirely on its AdWords system for its revenue. It was early 2011 and the beta release of our new search engine was now in full swing. We had made the bet that Google would soon shut off its organic data to the SEO world, and would cause everyone to need a “Google Simulator” to make their organic (SEO) marketing decisions. It was about this time that we started to see some peculiar things happening to Google’s search results. Namely, they were COVERED with ads. Now almost three quarters of the screen above the fold (the portion of the screen before you scroll down) were AdWords placements. And even the ads that were on the left side of the screen, the side that had been historically reserved for organic or natural results, had been made to seem as if they belonged there. You see, Google used to put its ads in a yellow box, something that was easily noticeable and told the user “hey, this is an ad, not like our pure organic results below this.” But now that yellow box was more like an off-white box, barely noticeable to the user. It was so bad that they got into major trouble with foreign governments, where they were eventually forced to place bright yellow ad markers next to their ads. There were so many ads it looked ridiculous. What had happened? Were increased profits this important? Surely, I thought, the engineers over at Google couldn’t approve. Watching its AdWords system overtake Google’s very own organic results was a sad moment for me as a computer scientist. I had observed the most amazing search engine grow up over the last decade: from crawling on its knees to running a marathon. And now, before my very own eyes, it seemed to morph
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overnight into a grumpy old man. The Google search engine had turned into the Google shopping engine. “This isn’t going to last”, I told my friends. “They are just trying some new things out.” But almost 3 years later, it hadn’t slowed down. It was clear where this was headed. On one hand, the search engine that I knew and loved was missing, and on the other hand my startup’s business model was handed to us on a silver platter.
Brands and SEOs: No Soup for You! For even more profit, there was only one last thing to do to squeeze the final drop of revenue out of this dried lemon. Many of the brands that were ranking organically on the Google search results didn’t even have to pay Google’s AdWords system to appear at the top. They had smartly made a long-term decision to invest in SEO instead of PPC. But what if Google started shutting off all of the data related to ranking naturally? They had been a “black box” for a decade, keeping their (perceived) enemy closer by offering up streams of keyword data and other insider information through the likes of Matt Cutts, the head of their Web SPAM team. Cutts would appear regularly at trade shows that I and many others would attend, occasionally offering nuggets of information to the SEO world on how to better rank naturally (this, by the way, had always been very strange thing to watch – having created a search engine, having already understood what Cutts knew himself, and then seeing him try to “filter” his responses to the industry, which were always vague and unactionable). But in 2013, the party was over. Matt Cutts, once put on a pedestal by the SEO industry for being its “gatekeeper” of information, was now literally hung out to dry, as Google started cutting off every source of organic data it could think of – driving brands into the wilderness and forcing every CMO to shift their budgets from SEO to Google’s pricey AdWords PPC system. I couldn’t believe it. My startup’s entire business model was predicated on the notion that “someday”, you wouldn’t be able to do SEO without your own “Google Simulator”. And Google was literally handing us our business. We had fortune 500 CMOs across the boardroom staring at us, as if we owned the last
Winter 2013
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