Google's Take on Search Plus Your World
A few weeks ago Google
announced the launch of
Search Plus Your World, which
deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.
While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with
the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows. While the launch was claimed to be social for personalizing results, the Google+ promotions appeared
on queries where they were clearly not the most relevant result even
when users are not logged into a Google account.
Google+ Over-promotion
A couple weeks ago when Google announced Google Search Plus Your World competitors collectively complained about Google over-promoting their own affiliated websites.
Twitter was perhaps the
loudest
complainer, highlighting how Google basically eats all the above-the-fold real estate with self promotion on
this @WWE search.
It is no surprise that folks like
Ben Edelman,
Scott Cleland &
Fair Search chimed in with complaints, as this is just a continuation of Google's path. But the complaints came from a far wider cast of characters on this move:
the mainstream press like CNN,
free market evangalists like the Economist,
Google worshipers indoctrinated in their culture who wrote a book on Google &
even ex-Googlers now
call into question Google's transparently self serving nature:
I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.
Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves, I'd rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion.
The FTC's
Google antitrust probe is to
expand to include
a review of Google+ integration in the search results.
Facebook & Twitter
launched a don't be evil plugin named
Focus On The User, which replaces Google+ promotion with promotion of profiles from Facebook& Twitter.
For the top tier broad social networks framing the idea of integrating promotion of their networks directly in the search results is a natural & desirable conclusion, but is that just a convenient answer to the wrong question?
- Whether
Google ranks any particular organic result above the corresponding Bing ranking in Google's now below-the-fold organic results is a bit irrelevant when the above the fold results are almost entirely Google.com. But is the core problem that we are under-representing social media in the search results? According to Compete.com, Facebook & YouTube combine to capture about 16% of all downstream Google clicks. Do we really need to increase that number until the web has a total of 5 websites on it? What benefit do we get out of
a web that is just a couple big walled gardens?
- If Facebook is already getting something like 20% of US pageviews & users are still looking for information elsewhere, doesn't that indicate that they probably desire something else? Absolutely Facebook should rank for Facebook navigational queries, but given
all their
notes
spam, I don't like seeing them in the search results much more than seeing a site like eHow.
- The
he said /
she said
data
deals are also highly irrelevant. What is really needed is further context. Before Google inserted Google+ in their search results
the Google+ social network was far less successful than MySpace (which recently
sold for only $35 million). If social media is added as an annotation to other 3rd party listings then I think that has the opportunity to add valuable context, but where a thin "me too" styled social media post replaces the publisher content it lowers the utility of the search results & wastes searcher's time. Further, when those social media results
are little more than human-powered content scrapers it also destroys the business models of legitimate online publishers.
Over-promotion vs "Search Spam"
At any point
Google can promote one of their new verticals in a prominent location in the search results & if they are anywhere near as good as the market leader eventually they can beat them out of nothing more than the combination of superior search placement, monopoly search marketshare,
account bundling & user laziness. What's more, they can make paid products free and/or partner with competitors 2 through x in an attempt to destroy the business model of anyone they couldn't acquire (talk to Groupon).
Amit Singhal
is obviously a brilliant guy, but I thought some of the answers he gave
during a recent interview by Danny Sullivan were quite evasive & perhaps a bit inauthentic. In particular, ...
- "The overall takeaway that I have in my mind is that people are judging a product and an overall direction that we have in the first two weeks of a launch, where we are producing a product for the long term." If the product wasn't ready for prime time you were not required to mix it directly into the organic search results right off the bat. It could have been placed at the bottom of the search results,
like the "Ask on Google" links were. Bing has been working on social search for 18 months & describes their moves as
"being very conservative."
- "The user feedback we have been getting has been almost the other side of the reaction we’ve seen in the blogosphere." Of course publishers who see their content getting scraped & see the scraped copy outranking the original have a financial incentive to care about a free & automated scraper site displacing their work. They don't get those pageviews, they don't get that referrer data, and they don't get those ad impressions. Google's PR team is
anything but impressed when another company dares do that to Google.
- "The users who have seen this in the wild are liking it, and our initial data analysis is showing the same." Much like the Google Webmaster Tools shows that pages with a +1 in the search results get a higher CTR, this Google+ social stuff also suffers from the same type of sampling bias & giving the listings a larger and more graphical stand out further help them pull in much more clicks.
Any form of visual highlighting & listing differentiation can lift CTR. I might be likely to click on some of my own results more, but when I do so you might just be grabbing a slice of navigational searches I was going to do anyway where I was looking for something else I posted on Google+ or my Google+ account or the account of a friend & so on. Further, aggregate data hides many data points that are counter to the general trend. I have seen instances of branded searches where the #1 organic site was getting a CTR above 70% (it even had organic sitelinks, further indicating it was a navigational search) and for such a search in some cases there were 2 Adwords ads above the organic results & then the Google+ page for a brand outranked the associated brand in the SERPs for those who followed it! That is a terrible user experience, particularly since the + page hasn't even had any activity for months.
- "Every time a real user is getting those results, they really are delighted. Given how personal this product is, you can only judge it based on personal experiences or by aggregate numbers you can observe through click-through." First, publishers are not fake users. Secondly, as mentioned above, there is a sampling bias & the + listings stand out with larger & more graphical listings. If they didn't get a higher CTR that would mean they were *really* irrelevant.
- "out of the gate, whereas we had limited users to train this system with, I’m actually very happy with the outcome of the personal results." They could have been placed at the bottom of the search results or off to the side or some such until there was greater confidence in the training set.
- "People are coming to a conclusion about the product today, within the first two weeks, and they’re not fully seeing the potential where we can build this product around real identities and real relationships." If a publisher promotes a site to the top of the search results & then says something like 'we will improve quality later' they are branded as spammers. In the past Google has justified penalizing a site
based on its old content that no longer exists on the site. Investing in depth, quality & volume is a cycle. If others get prohibited from evolving through the cycles due to algorithms like Panda then it becomes quite hard to compete with a new start up when Google can just insert whatever it wants right near the top & then work on quality after the fact.
- "We don’t think of this as a promotional unit now. This is a place that you would find people with real identities who would be interesting for your queries." If this is the case then why does it only promote Google+?
- "We’re very open to incorporating information from other services, but that needs to be done on terms that wouldn’t change in a short period of time and make our products vanish." The problem is, if a company builds a reputation as a secretive one that clones the work of its partners & customers then people don't want to do open-ended transparent relationships. Naive folks might need to see the blood and tears 3 or 4 times to pick up on the trend, but even the slowest of the slow notice it after a dozen such moves.
- "I’m just very wary of building a product where the terms can be changed." Considering Google's lack of transparency & self-promotional bias on the social networking front, would you be fully transparent and open with Google? If so, then aren't the search algorithms complex enough that it would make sense to make those transparent as well? How can you ask other social networks to increase transparency at the same time Google is locking down their search data on claims of protecting user privacy?
- "It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, and when you start talking about these things and what it takes to build this, the data needed is much more than we can publicly crawl." This is where being trustworthy is so crucial. Past interactions with Yelp, TripAdvisor & Groupon likely make future potential partners more risk adverse & cautious. Outrageous "accidents" like those that happened with Mocality & Open Street Map from playing fast and loose further erode credibility. And even when Google hosts the media & has full access to user data they still rank inferior stuff sometimes (like
the recent Santorum YouTube cartoon fiasco), even on widely searched core/head keywords.
The big issue is that if people feel the game is rigged they won't have much incentive to share on Google+. I largely only share stuff that is irrelevant to tangentially relevant to our business interests & won't share stuff that is directly relevant, because I don't want to be forced to compete against an inferior version of my own work when the deck is stacked so the inferior version wins simply because it is hosted on Google.
As we move into the information age a lot of physical stores are shutting down. Borders went bust last year. Sears announced the closure of many stores. And many of the people shopping in the physical stores that remain
are using cell phones for price comparisons. Given Google's mobile OS share this is another area where they can build trust or burn it. A friend today mentioned how their online prices on Google Product search almost always show a lower price near the header than the lowest price available in the list - sometimes by a substantial margin.
Identity vs Anonymous Contractors
In the past we have mentioned that
transparency is often a self-serving & hypocritical policy by those atop power systems who want to limit the power of those whom they aim to control.
When
Google was caught promoting illegal drug ads there was no individual who took the blame for it. When the Mocality scraping & the Open Street Map vandalism issues happened, all that we were told was that Google "was mortified" and it was "a contractor." If people who did hit jobs could just place all the blame on "the contractor" then the world would be a pretty crappy place!
Eric Schmidt
warned that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." That sage advice came from the same Eric Schmidt
that blackballed cNet for positing personal information about him. Around the same time Eric offered the above quote,
Google was engaged in secret & illegal backdoor deals with direct competitors to harm their own employees.
What happened to Google recruiters who dared to go against the illegal pact?
They were fired on the hour:
"Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?" Schmidt wrote.
Google's staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the hour."
When Google+ launched they demanded that you use your real name
or don't use the product. They later claimed that
you can use a nickname on your account as well, but
there is a difference between a nickname and pseudonyms.
What is so outrageous about the claims for this need for real identities is that past studies have shown that
pseudonymous comments are best & Bruce Schneier highlighted how we lose our individuality
if we are under an ever-watchful eye:
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
In many markets
ads and content are blended in a way that is hard to distingush between them. Whenever Google wants to enter
they can demand greater
transparency
to participate (and then use the standard formatted data from that transparency to create a meta-competitor in the market.)
Increasingly Google is placing
more of their search data & their webmaster-related functions
behind a registration wall.
If you are rich & powerful they will
sell you the data. If you are
the wrong type of webmaster that aggregate data can be used
in *exceptionally* personal ways.
User Privacy
Ahead of Google updating their privacy policy Google has directed a large portion of their ad budget toward ads about
how they protect users online.
What better way to ensure user privacy than to allow them to register their accounts under psydonyms? The real name policy on Google+ was part of what made Google want to stop providing referrer data for logged in users who search on Google. This has had a knock on effect where other social sites are
framing everything,
requiring registration to read more of public user generated content &
sending outbound traffic through redirects.
Google's
new
privacy policy allows them to
blend your user data from one service into refining the experience (and ads) on another:
If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We’ll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for and get you those results faster.
Google & Facebook's
war (against) user privacy is catching
media and
governmental attention. Microsoft highlighted some of Google's issues in
their "putting people first" ad campaign & the blowback has caused Google not only to publish PR-spin
"get the facts" styled blog posts, but to launch
yet another ad campaign.
EU regulators have asked Google to
pause their privacy policy changes.
Bogus Testimonials & Social Payola
Is social media a cleaner signal than links? If search engines put the same weight on social media that they put on links it would get spammed to bits. It won't be long until a firm like Ad.ly offers sponsored Google+ posts.
Some have suggested that
you won't be able to buy Google+ followers however Google already includes user pictures on AdWords ads (even when they desire not to be &
even when they didn't endorse the product that Google suggests they endorsed). In due time I expect Google will indeed sell followers & other user interactions as ad units (just like Twitter & Facebook do).
Further, celebrities
sell Tweets to advertisers. When they are hot
their rates go up:
When Ad.ly introduced self-destructing Charlie Sheen to Twitter, he was paid about $50,000 per tweet. It was worth it. Sheen’s tweet for Internships.com generated 95,333 clicks in the first hour and 450,000 clicks in 48 hours, created a worldwide trending topic out of #tigerbloodintern, attracted 82,148 internship applications from 181 countries, and added 1 million additional visits to Internships.com.
Search engines might consider these to be clean signals if those same search engines were not busy buying the manipulation of said "relevancy" signals.
Attention is purchased to create demand. It isn't comfortable to put it this way, but we are trained to obey authority &
to like what
others like:
The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which equates with four degrees of separation to thousands of people, Mr. Fischer said. Metrics like that led him to believe that if Facebook could figure out a way to capitalize on "social endorsements," it would be like creating a word-of-mouth campaign that could reach millions of people simultaneously. Since the campaigns would come from a friend, they would theoretically be taken more seriously than, say, a TV commercial, he said.
On an individual basis
reviews and
ratings get faked everywhere. Even stodgy old slow-moving institutions like colleges
game their ranking systems.
There recently was a question raised about
how Google's rating systems skewed high on the underlying data. Surely Overstock (the same Overstock Google penalized earlier this year) wouldn't promote Google's trusted stores aggressively on their own site if it made their business appear worse than it actually is, thus a positive bias must be baked in to the system.
Entire categories of demand are created by those
tied in
with power cost shifting to create bubbles. The federal reserve helped spark a real estate bubble with low interest rates.
FBI warnings of mortgage fraud were ignored. Consumers were constantly fed propaganda about "real estate only goes up." Then when that bubble popped, the US government bailed out those who caused it & burned trillions of Dollars propping up home prices. The government even bailed out a company that is
now shorting the housing market (when that company was about to get bailed out
the secretary of treasury leaked that material non-public information to some of his criminal investor buddies).
Does all the above sound circular, conflicting, corrupt & confusing? It should, because that is how power works & comes off as seeming semi-legitimate when acting in illigitimate ways. The
perception of
reality is
warped to create profitable opportunties that are monetized on the way up and the way down.
Millions of kids take drugs that
address the symptoms of being a child full of energy, imagination & entusiasm.
In some cases they may need them, but in most cases they probably don't. The solution with the highest economic return gets the largest ad budget, even if it only treats symptoms.
Web Scrape Plus+ (Now With More Scraping)
When the +1 button & Google+ launched, Google highlighted
how they would use the + button usage as a "relevancy" signal. Google recently started
inserting + pages directly into the search results for brands & right from the very start
they were using it as a scraper website that would outrank the original content source.
Google used the buy in from their promised relevancy signal to create
a badge-based incentivized system which acts as a glorified PageRank funnel to further juice the rankings of these new pages on a domain name that already had a PageRank 10.
I recently read a blog post about
how anyone could do the above & the opportunity is open to everyone. But the truth is, I can't state that something will become a relevancy signal that manipulates the search results in order to get buy in. Or, if I did something which actually had the same net effect, Google would likely chop my legs off for promoting a link scheme.
Recently the topic of Google+ as a scraper site came up yet again
via Read Write Web & on Hacker News a Googler stated that
it was "childish" to place any of the blame on Google!!!!!!
Google determines
how much information is shown near each listing & can create "relevancy" signals in ways that
things tied to Google get over-represented (
look at the +1 count here). When they do that & it destroys other business models *of course*
Google deserves
100% of the blame.
Thin Content & Scraper Sites
Remember the whole justification for Panda was that thin content was a poor user experience?
In spite of sites like eHow getting hit,
Google is still pre-paying them to upload content to Youtube.
Now that the (non-Google hosted) thin content has been disappeared (
and the % of downstream traffic from Google to Youtube has more then doubled in the past year) it is time for Google to take another slice of the search traffic stream with
Search Plus Your World:
The Google vs Facebook locked down walled garden contest will retard innovation. As the corporate internet silos grow larger
the independent web withers. Them going after each other may leave room for Twitter, but
it doesn't leave lots of room is left for others, as
the economics of publishing have to work or the publishers die.
Start ups that were on a successful trajectory
were killed by Panda:
The startup had been on a roll up until last February when Google altered its ranking algorithm with the release of “Panda.” The changes decimated TeachStreet’s traffic, and the company never quite recovered.
“We lost a lot of our traffic, and overnight we started talking to partners for biz dev, not for acquisition,” he said. However, many of the potential partners wanted to know about an outright acquisition.
About.com
was also smoked by Google:
The biggest worry, though, is that the decline of About.com itself may be irreversible. Fewer people are clicking on About ads placed by Google and the site’s own display ads have dropped in value.
The company has attributed this decline in value to Google’s decision last year to downgrade About pages in its search results. With more than 80% of traffic coming from search, the Google denigration was indeed a blow but About’s problems may be rooted in something deeper.
Keep in mind that the reason these websites were hit was that they were claimed to be thin & thus a poor user experience. When the NYT bought About.com one of the top competing bidders
was Google!
Now that the "thin content" has been demoted in the search results Google can integrate deep content silos from Google+, like this one:
That is an 8-word Google+ post about how short another blog post is. I like Todd & do like to read his writings, but here Google is clearly favoring the same sort of content they would have torched if it was done on an independent webmaster's website.
How Google has raters view other websites that redirect traffic is based upon those sites having a substantial value add. Clearly in the above example there was nothing added to the interaction beyond sharing a bookmark with a punchy tagline.
If Google wants to use the + notation to pull up that other referenced page then perhaps that can make sense, but to list an 8-word Google+ page in the search results nearly a year after the Panda algorithm is outrageous. This sort of casual mention integration in the search results occurs on expensive keywords as well. Not only do they list your own Google+ posts...
...but they also list them from anyone you follow...
In addition to information pollution, the other big issue here is time. Google wants to make forms more standardized
to make filling them out faster &
they give regular sermons on the importance of fast search results. Yet when I do a navigational search, Google delivers two AdWords ads, a huge Google+ promotion, and then the navigational search result barely above the fold.*
*Since I thought the above was obnoxious, I renamed our Google+ company page to
S_E_O Book
to help Google fix their relevancy problems.
Can anyone explain how Google's speed bias is aligned with putting plus junk right at the top, even on brand searches? Yahoo! has been pretty aggressive with putting shopping ads in the search results, but their implementation is still a better user experience than what Google did above.
And Bing offers an even cleaner experience than that.
Due to
how Google integrates Google+ in such a parasitic way I see
no incentive for participating on their network except when I have something that is outside of my domain of expertise, something that I am not targeting commercially, something that is thin, or something irrelevant to say! That incentive structure combined with
Google's photo meme feature will ensure that
content marketers will help plenty of people see Star Wars stuff ranking for
mortgage loan
search queries.
When you own search/navigation you own language. that position can easily be extended into any other direction/market
in a way a social graph can not:
"The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English," McNealy said. "All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business."
Further, Google can chose at any point to
respond to or
ignore market regulations in accordance with whatever makes them the most money. They can also fund 3rd parties doing the same (
like undermining copyright) to force others to strike an official deal with Google to be "open."
A lot of businesses live on small profit margins, so Google's ability to insert itself & fund criminal 3rd parties aligned with Google's internal longterm interests is a big big big deal. Companies will learn that you either work with Google on Google's terms or you die.
When a public relations issue brews they can
quickly change their approach and again position themselves as the white knight.
Brand Equity & Forcing the Brand Buy
Yahoo! put out
a research paper highlighting activity bias, stating that the efficacy of online advertising is often over-stated because people who see ads about a topic were already more closely tied in with that particular network & that particular topic before they even saw the ad. As an example, any person who sees an AdWords ad for
hemorrhoid treatment
was already searching for hemorrhoid-related topics before they saw your ad (thus they were in the subset of individuals that might have came across your site in some way if you were in the search ad ecosystem or not).
This sort of activity bias-driven selection bias (homophily) exists on social networks
online &
offline.
Google did
research on incrementality of ads & they came to the opposite conclusion as Yahoo! did. Google suggested you should buy, buy, buy, even on your own branded keywords. They suggested that testing was expensive (no mention that the only reason it is expensive is because Google chooses not to make such tools easily accessible to advertisers) & that the clicks were so cheap on branded keywords that you should buy, buy, buy. Many advertisers who mix brand & non-brand keywords together don't realize that
they are using the "returns" from bidding on their own brand to subsidize over-paying for other keywords.
Google Analytics is the leading & most widely used web analytics program. They can share
whatever metrics help them sell more ads (defaulting to crediting the last click for conversions, even if it was on a navigational search to your site) & pull back on features that are not aligned with their business interests (SEO referral data anyone?)
This goes back to
Scott McNealy's quote: "The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English. All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business."
Analysts
didn't understand why
Google CPC rates were down 8%
last quarter while overall search clicks were up 34%. The biggest single reason was likely more clicks on adlinks on branded AdWords ads. While a brand buying its own keyword typically pays far less per click than
what some of the biggest keywords go for, the branded keywords typically have an exceptionally high CTR.
Those additional clicks dragged down Google's average CPC, but the extra revenue they offered was a big par of the reason why Google was about to grow at 25% even though their display network only grew at 15%.
That slow growth of display is in spite of Youtube now serving over 4 billion video streams per day & Google adding display ads to log out pages.
Online views
are not the same as TV views. A comScore study found that
31% of display ads are never seen. In spite of that, US online advertising will
reach nearly $40 billion this year.
Google wants to insert itself as a needed cost of business in the same way
credit card companies have.
On Google Maps they put an ad inside your location box.
Even if
most people don't participate on Google+, Google can
still force advertiser buy in through over-promotion of the network in the search results. On your branded keywords they may drive your organic listing below the fold & put Google+ front & center.
Facebook earnings
are still growing much faster than Google's & Facebook encourages advertisers to
advertise their Facebook pages, so even when you pay for the click Facebook still keeps the user. Facebook is
adding apps to the timeline &
is trying to win VEVO music video hosting from YouTube.
While Google is primarily known as a search company, it is getting harder to get off of Google though any channel other than a toll booth. Google keeps
driving the organic search results downward, while Google verticals fill up many of the organic results that remain. Many companies already buy Google ads on their own YouTube content. Some buy ads on Google to drive them to their Youtube videos & then buy ads on their own Youtube video to promote their websites. Soon Google will try to push you to buy them on your Google+ page as well.
Google is becoming a walled garden:
Google wants to control more elements of your social world now. They don’t just want to be a search engine.
Is that so bad? Maybe not. It’s certainly no different from how other companies, from AOL, to Microsoft, to Apple, to Disney, to Facebook, have viewed the world — as ideally a walled garden, an all-consuming platform that most people use for pretty much every form of entertainment and social interaction.
A lot of people thought that Google was somehow different. They were, of course, wrong.
...
To move forward either as the old Google or Google+, Google needs to be capable of making fair deals with the partner ecosystem. It needs to curb its instinct to kill competing media companies that were actually producing great content that Google helped you find.
I suspect there will be plenty of bloodshed before Google figures that one out.
"This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else." -
Larry Page
Google no longer believes in the concept of the open web. Blame it on Larry Page becoming the CEO, blame it on him talking to Steve Jobs & Steve telling him to make fewer and tighter products, blame it on Google funding eHow, or blame it on basically anything. But if you go back far enough, much of the stuff that is going on now
was clearly envisioned a decade ago:
I was lucky enough to chat with Larry one-to- one about his expectations for Google back in 2002. He laid out far-reaching views that had nothing to do with short-term revenue goals, but raised questions about how Google would anticipate the day sensors and memory became so cheap that individuals would record every moment of their lives. He wondered how Google could become like a better version of the RIAA - not just a mediator of digital music licensing - but a marketplace for fair distribution of all forms of digitized content. I left that meeting with a sense that Larry was thinking far more deeply about the future than I was, and I was convinced he would play a large role in shaping it. I would rather jump on board that bullet train than ride a local that never missed a revenue stop but never." - Douglas Edwards
What happens when the Google+ version of your content outranks the version on your own site? And what happens when your branded channel and/or your fans become a vertical ad silo Google sells to your competitors?
I tested submitting a couple posts to Google+ with a Wordtracker top keywords list & valuable keywords (on a cpc*traffic) basis in posts about top keywords. Those posts rank #2 or #3 in Google for many people that follows me. No harm to me since those posts were irrelevant to this site, but if they were about my theme & topic I just would have out-competed myself. When Google outranks you (even with a copy of your content) they get to taste the data again and sell off the attention another time. You only get a slice of that monetization, even when it is your work that is being monetized. Maybe it is great for stuff that is somewhat less relevant and/or keywords that are so competitive that you otherwise wouldn't score for them, but we have to be really careful we don't out-compete ourselves. Though if Googke keeps this up they won't be the only ones monetizing it. Give it a few months and celebrities will be selling sponsored Google+ posts based on some metric created by multiplying search volume, CPC & how many followers they have.
Is Bing Better? Will Enough People Ask That Question to Matter?
For years Google built their reputation as being the search engine that offered the cleanest & fastest search results. They were known for monetizing less aggressively than the competition. But over the past couple years
Google has dialed up their ads to where
they now send a greater ratio of ad traffic than organic search traffic. One Google engineer recently described the ability to rank highly in Google without buying their ads as
being a bug that was getting fixed!
Google's big risk in their coupling of aggressive monetization,
aggressive self-promotion & changing how users feel about user privacy is that they can create the perception that users should go elsewhere for for an honest or trustworthy search. This not only builds momentum for smaller search services like
DuckDuckGo &
Blekko, but has also won praise for Bing from
Gizmodo,
Dave Winer &
The Next Web.
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1. Assists in ensuring the efficient and in coordinating the cross-functional product development and maintenance activities.
2. Assists in the area of new business opportunities by providing feasibility studies, marketing surveys, industry data and direct client contact.
3. Assists section manager in upward production services, using current cost estimates, margin and commission guidelines provided by management along with market information.
4. Develop working relationships with sales and medical representatives.
5. Assist Sales and medical teams during presentation and trials, conducting presales demos and in resolving customer satisfaction issues as appropriate.
6. Makes recommendations for sales promotion literature and any other literature as assigned by the Section Manager.
7. Obtains and analyzes competitor equipment and accessories and utilizes this information to make recommendations to the Section Manager to adjust the Company's product line offering services based on products and programs found in the marketplace.
8. Makes production services improvement recommendations to meet changing operational, sales and market needs.
9. Regularly reviews product specifications to ensure they are functionally and technically accurate.
10. Assists in developing strategies to adjust and promote various product lines, to improve revenues and create demand for company’s suite of products and services.
11. Develops and maintains solid technical knowledge of company's suite of products and services.
12. Collects, monitors and analyzes sales trends to provide up-to-date product line forecasts.
13. Researches product issues and deficiencies with appropriate documentation to provide explanations for production problems.
14. Monitors and reports on status of production services activities.
15. Conducts functional level testing of new product capabilities prior to release to ensure product is meeting performance standards set for product.
16. Assists in demonstrations of products to prospective customers.
17. Oversees the engineering and/or the section in charge for order activities.
18. Assists in trade show activities and conducts field research on channel/end user receptivity to new products, competitor activity, etc.
19. Coordinate the production and implementation of product training and related educational materials.
20. Maintain clinical expertise on products.
21. Attends meetings as necessary, undertakes appropriate Management reporting
22. Performs other duties as assigned.
Job Details
| Date Posted: | 2012-02-05 |
| Job Location: | Al Kuwait, Kuwait |
| Job Role: | Sales |
| Company Industry: | Pharmaceutical; Healthcare, Practitioner and Technician; Healthcare, other |
Preferred Candidate
| Career Level: | Mid Career |
| Nationality: | Bahrain; Jordan; Lebanon |
| Degree: | Bachelor's degree/higher diploma |
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Futures Group
United Republic of Tanzania (the)
15 Mar 2012
About Us
Futures Group develops and delivers innovative, locally relevant, evidence-based solutions to improve the health and well being of people around the world. Since 1971, we have assisted governmental and non-governmental agencies, foundations, and the private sector by designing, implementing and evaluating programs in HIV/AIDS, sexual and reproductive health, population and family planning, maternal and child health, infectious diseases, and gender. Futures Group has deep expertise in policy and advocacy, research and strategic information, health markets and private sector engagement, modeling and economic analysis, patient monitoring and management/HMIS, strategic consulting, and program management.
Position Summary
Futures Group is providing monitoring & evaluation (M&E) assistance to a 5-year USAID-funded project supporting the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MoHSW) efforts to lead, manage, and coordinate the national response to the Most Vulnerable Children (MVC) and HIV prevention among youth. Specifically, the Project’s purpose is to expand critical services for orphans and other vulnerable children and targeted HIV/AIDS services for youth in three regions of the central zone of Tanzania: Dodoma, Singida and Iringa. It seeks to improve the wellbeing of 150,000 MVC by strengthening the capacity of Local Government Authorities (LGAs) in managing and monitoring the MVC response, increasing access to quality and community-level comprehensive health and socio-economic services, increasing youth and child participation in addressing problems and issues affecting MVCs, and strengthening the capacity of Tanzanian civil society organizations to provide leadership in addressing MVC issues. The Project includes 17 local NGos, including several FBOs.
The Senior Monitoring and Evaluation Advisor is expected to work closely with the Futures Group Senior M&E Advisor based in Washington, DC, the Project’s Chief of Party, and other relevant M&E and project staff in Tanzania on monitoring and evaluating the Project..
Key Responsibilities
• Provide in-country M&E related leadership to the Pamoja Tuwalee Project • Harmonize and support capacity building around agreed processes for the timely collection, management, analysis, and reporting of valid and reliable data that meet the GOT and USG reporting requirements • Support the Project to implement and periodically update (as needed) the Performance Monitoring Plan • Build the capacity of sub-grantee and LGA partners to collect, analyze, use and report community-level data up to district and national levels. • Facilitate the development/refinement and use of M&E tools and build consensus on indicators to report on progress in providing quality and beneficial services to MVCs. • Provide technical assistance and lead further analysis of assessments and studies on MVCs in Tanzania • Assist the Project in developing and implementing a project database that will enable the project to monitor service reach and delivery and track progress in project implementation • Contribute to evaluation research on the effectiveness of the Project including secondary analysis of existing data
Qualifications
• Masters-level degree in evaluation, public health or another relevant discipline • 10+ years of M&E experience, including M&E of national initiatives and public health programs and developing performance monitoring plans (PMPs) • Sound understanding of indicators, data collection methodology, data quality issues; ability to develop indicators and data collection tools and assess data quality; • Knowledge of and interest in HIV and AIDS issues in Tanzania • Experience with community development programs a plus; • Experience in strengthening the demand for data and facilitating the use of information in the decision-making process at different levels – from the facility and programmatic level up to the national level; • Demonstrated skills in training and capacity building through technical assistance and mentoring. This includes strong skills in public speaking, and delivering trainings and workshops; • Demonstrated quantitative skills, including use of Microsoft Excel and SPSS, and skills in analyzing, interpreting and communicating information to a variety of stakeholders; • Fluency in written and spoken English and Swahili; • Strong writing skills and experience in reporting to international donors, including the US Government; • Willingness to travel throughout Tanzania; • This is a local position (based in Dar es Salaam) and thus preference will be given to Tanzanian nationals.
Physical Demands
• Regularly required to stand or sit, and move about the facility
Work Environment
• Usual office working conditions free of disagreeable elements.
All applications for this position should be submitted online at
www.futuresgroup.com via the Careers page. Futures Group provides equal employment to all participants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, veteran or marital status.
All applications for this position should be submitted online at
www.futuresgroup.com via the Careers page. Futures Group provides equal employment to all participants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, veteran or marital status.
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JEFFREY BROWN: Payrolls were up and unemployment was down in the January jobs report.
The president hailed the news today, while Republicans insisted it could've been better still.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The economy is growing stronger. The recovery is speeding up. And we've got to do everything in our power to keep it going.
JEFFREY BROWN: President Obama wasted no time this morning at a fire station in Arlington, Va., touting the best job creation numbers in nine months.
In fact, the Labor Department report exceeded economists' hopes, with 243,000 jobs added in January, about 90,000 more than expected. The unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent, the lowest in three years. The rate has been down for five months in a row.
And there were other positives: 50,000 new jobs in manufacturing and 21,000 in construction.
In Nevada, though, Republicans campaigning for the president's job said the increases could have been seen a long time ago.
MITT ROMNEY (R): The policies of this administration have not been helpful. They, in fact, have been harmful. They have slowed down the recovery, made it more difficult.
NEWT GINGRICH (R): Obama raises taxes, increases regulation, is anti-American energy, and engages in class warfare, sort of the anti-jobs presidency.
JEFFREY BROWN: Republicans in Congress pointed to nearly 13 million people still out of work and nearly 24 million considered underemployed.
But at his event this morning, the president warned against repeating what he called mistakes of the past, when Republicans ran the government.
BARACK OBAMA: We can't go back to the policies that led to the recession. And we can't let Washington stand in the way of our recovery.
So I want to send a clear message to Congress: Do not slow down the recovery that we're on. Don't muck it up. Keep it moving in the right direction.
(APPLAUSE)
JEFFREY BROWN: The president also outlined a program to hire veterans for conservation work on public lands.
At the same time, he cautioned that employment figures may fluctuate. The Congressional Budget Office issued a similar warning this week. It projected that unemployment could return to near 9 percent later this year.
We'll get to the politics of the jobs situation later, but, first, we look at the numbers themselves.
Joel Prakken is co-founder and senior managing director of Macroeconomic Advisers, an economic analysis firm in Saint Louis. Harry Holzer, a former chief economist for the Labor Department, now teaches at Georgetown University.
And, Harry Holzer, I'll start with you.
A nice surprise, for a change. What are the key positives you see here?
HARRY HOLZER, Georgetown University: Well, the payroll growth number of over 240,000 was really much larger than most of us expected it to be.
We had had a couple of good months already. Last couple of months came in at about 150,000 and then about 200,000. We expected possibly some sliding back, as has often happened in this recovery. The fact that we came in at 240,000 growth across most sectors of the economy, the dip in unemployment, all of that was positive news.
JEFFREY BROWN: You said most sectors. Fill that in a little bit. Where did you see things that looked particularly good?
HARRY HOLZER: You saw it in manufacturing, also in construction, which we haven't seen much of any recovery so far. You saw it at the high end in professional services. But you also saw it at the low end in leisure and hospitality, health care which, of course, has been strong throughout, so really spread quite nicely across most parts of the economy.
JEFFREY BROWN: Joel Prakken, I want to ask you about some of the reservations. But, first, stay on the good news here. What would you add to that? What jumped out at you?
JOEL PRAKKEN, Macroeconomic Advisers: Well, better than expected.
And in this economy, we like the upside surprises. I agree with the previous comments. And as your viewers almost certainly know, this report today actually has two surveys on employment, the establishment employment, the numbers for which you just reported. But it also polls households to see what their employment statistics are.
And that separate survey of employment actually grew in excess of 300,000 for the month. So there was corroborating evidence in the companion survey that employment is on the uptick.
JEFFREY BROWN: Now, staying with you, Joel Prakken, this has all been so up and down. Give us the continuing concerns here, or start that out. What reservations do you want to throw out there when we look at what we see today?
JOEL PRAKKEN: First thing to remember is that employment is generally considered to be a lagging indicator of the economy. So the uptick we're seeing here could just be a reflection of the strengthening in GDP growth that occurred in the last part of 2011.
In the first half of 2012, there are some legitimate concerns about how fast the recovery will proceed. First, we've got the constant drag from housing. We built too many houses. We have to work off that physical inventory. We have a lot of houses that could go into foreclosure, gumming up the works.
And of course there's the ongoing constipation in the mortgage finance market. Fiscal policy is in contractionary mode. The Obama stimulus is winding down. The spending caps that were passed as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011 are starting to bite. And state and local governments face ongoing pressures that are forcing them to raise taxes and trim.
In addition, there are uncertainties emanating out of the debt crisis in Europe. If a -- quote -- "Lehman event" -- unquote -- happens in Europe during 2012, it could send financial shockwaves around the globe without regard to economic borders.
And all of these risks and uncertainties occur at a time when the Federal Reserve, having already pushed interest rates very low, is not very well poised to try to offset any negative surprises.
JEFFREY BROWN: Harry Holzer, pick up on the -- where we started, was the -- how do you view the unemployment number, as a lagging indicator, as a helpful indicator for how strong the economy really is?
HARRY HOLZER: It is a lagging indicator. It does usually lag by at least a few months.
What's interesting is that at the end of last year, we had GDP growth, economic growth of a little under 3 percent. That's a good number, relative to what it's been. It's not a spectacular number. And -- and we're not even sure that that's going to survive going into the future. Some of that was just businesses restocking their inventories.
So there was concern about whether that kind of production will continue. And yet it does seem to be enough to have lead to some job growth over the last several months. On the plus side, population growth has slowed. Productivity growth has slowed. So even a modest amount of economic growth does seem to be translating into some job growth, at least for now.
And, again, whether or not it continues is anybody's guess.
JEFFREY BROWN: And, Joel Prakken, of course, the president himself warned that the numbers may bounce around. That's what you're suggesting, is that we may well see things go down for a few more months before perhaps they go -- continue -- I'm sorry -- go up again, the unemployment number go up for a few months before it continues down.
JOEL PRAKKEN: Yes. As pleased as I am with today's number, it's far too early to know whether this is an inflection point or some kind of breakout report on the employment side.
There are enough economic uncertainties facing us in 2012 that it is simply premature to do handstands over today's number, as encouraging as it, in fact, was.
JEFFREY BROWN: And bring in the Fed, Joel Prakken, the Fed saying this week as it said the week before that they're just going to keep the interest rates very, very low through 2014, suggesting continuing real fears about the economy, right?
JOEL PRAKKEN: That's correct.
The Federal Reserve is interested in promoting a healthy recovery. It has said now that interest rates will be maintained at a low level for the next several years, extraordinarily low levels. And that is a stimulus to the economy.
Whether it is enough of a stimulus in combination with the other risks and uncertainties facing us to promote very strong job growth in the coming months is anybody's guess. But let's put this in some perspective. We're still five million or so jobs below the previous peak, and even further below the level of jobs that would be necessary to get us back to a full employment rate of, say, 5 percent if the participation rate was as high as it was three or four years ago.
And one of the things that Harry noted that is very interesting here, the unemployment rate is falling with very slow economic growth.
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, what does -- expand on that, Harry Holzer. What does that mean? What does that tell us?
HARRY HOLZER: It tells us that, at least for now -- there used to be a rule of thumb that said you need about at least 3 percent economic growth to lower the unemployment rate, because you need about 1 percent to absorb extra population growth, and you need about 2 percent to absorb higher productivity growth.
In the last year, productivity growth has slowed down. Over the long term, that's not great. But in the short term, it helps you. Population growth, on the immigration side especially, has slowed down. So even a smaller amount of GDP growth is translating into some drop in unemployment.
That is a good thing. Also, part of the unemployment drop has also been just some people who have stopped looking for work. That's not such a good thing.
JEFFREY BROWN: That has been a long-term problem.
HARRY HOLZER: That's right. If they come back in, in the next six to 12 months, you can could see the unemployment rate tick back up, even if jobs are being created.
JEFFREY BROWN: But we've had so many months and even years of bad news. Give us a little good news, since it is a good news day, just to end this. For people that have suffered for a long time, does this suggest some hope?
HARRY HOLZER: This suggests hope.
And if you look at some specific groups, the unemployment rate among men has dropped pretty significantly the last two or three months. Unemployment rate for African-Americans is down significantly. We hope that lasts.
But these are some the groups that got hit really hard. So they're starting to see some relief. And we now have four or five straight months of improvement in the job numbers. I don't know if that's a trend or not. It is too early to celebrate, but it's nice see that trend so far.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right. We will all, of course, watch.
Harry Holzer and Joel Prakken, thank you both very much.
HARRY HOLZER: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: For more on the jobs numbers online, we have Paul Solman's own measure of unemployment, which includes the underemployed and those out of work so long, the government no longer counts them. That's on our Making Sense page.
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