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Can we still rely on Google
Return to text blog entriesArticle date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:09:14 GMTAs Search Engine's go, Google is King and in Search Engine Optimisation terms, as Google accounts for around 63 per cent of global searches, most SEOs tend to focus on Google rankings as a bench mark for the potential performance of a website.
The thing is this, the biggest search engine in the world - and probably the world's biggest brand doesn't always get it right. On January 31st, some time around 2:30pm (UK time), due to human error, Google search results returned a warning message for about an hour. All searches returned a message declaring: "Warning - visiting this website may harm your computer!" and if this wasn't damaging enough to online brands, Google actively places another screen between its search ranking pages and the website a searcher wanted to visit which directs them to StopBadware.org, the not for profit organisation that Google works with to maintain and update their database of potentially dangerous websites. These Google searches sent millions of visitors to the StopBadware.org site, which caused it to crash.
This raises a bigger question, with 63% of the market share Text, like most internet marketing organizations benchmark their sites on Google. However, unlike many SEO companies, Text also sees the value of optimizing sites for other search engines, such as (amongst others) Live, Yahoo and Ask.com. The 37% of global searches not carried out on Google is not an insignificant amount and it's a SEOs duty to resist a clients desire to focus solely on Google and discount all other search engines.
The simple human error that brought down Google on Saturday 31st January 2008 should serve as a warning to us all. Putting all your eggs in one basket could prove to be potentially detrimental. Google is the dominant search engine, but it wasn't always the case and empires are made and lost on the internet at a faster rate than most other business sectors. All it would take is another great idea in the search market to get Google on its back foot, or a few too many of these kinds of mistakes before the SEO world would reorientate itself.
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