Celebrity Net Worth: Misunderstanding the Google?
August 12, 2020
Navigate to this link to view the PDF of testimony from the founder of Celebrity Net Worth. Don’t you love it when Google hides urls? Try to find the document whose title appears in the next paragraph. Give up. It makes life so much easier for bad actors and people wondering “Where did that document come from?” and “Who puts this document online?” Helpful as ever. DarkCyber loves Google. Who needs to know provenance type information? Losers that’s who!
But I digress. Click here and read “Written Statement for the Record by Brian Warner for a hearing before The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law titled Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 2: Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” July 16, 2019.
The write up makes clear that Celebrity Net Worth misunderstood Google. Mr. Warner and others involved with Celebrity Net Worth believed one of the founders of Google who said in an S-1 document filed with the SEC in 2004:
“We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information … Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results … We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.” — Larry Page, co-founder of Google
The write up documents how Google scraped content from Celebrity Net Worth and displayed it on search results pages. Usage of Celebrity Net Worth dropped “20 percent.” By 2016, Celebrity Net Worth was no longer at the top of a search for celebrity net worth. Traffic dropped another “50 percent.” By 2019, traffic to Celebrity Net Worth was 80 percent lower than in 2014.
The write up includes these data:
In June 2019, search engine analyst Rand Fishkin put together a report about Google using data from web analytics firm Jumpshot . The data show that today an estimated 48.96% of all Google searches end with the searcher NOT clicking through to a website. The same report estimates that 7% of all search clicks go to a paid ad result and 12% go to properties owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. Moreover, those stats do not even show the full extent of the problem because the data largely relied upon desktop devices and could not track searches that took users to a Google-owned app like the YouTube or Google Maps.
These data are highly suggestive. However, Google has to generate revenue, and it — like many other information finding services — does what’s best for itself. This self-interest is explained in terms of “user experience,” not in terms of making money, increasing information control, and ensuring that clicks benefit Google.
The misunderstanding is that individuals with good idea assumed that Mother Google wanted to be supportive, be friends, and do what some people would assume to be appropriate.
How’s that working out? That’s why DarkCyber loves Google. Just take the information provided and don’t think. Cuba Libre does not exist if it is not on a Google Map. The Auto Channel car reviews don’t exist if not in the Google search results. And Foundem? Who the heck runs that site? DarkCyber absolutely loves Google but sometimes one must embrace a Swiss Cow?
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2020
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