If you have a niche blog or site, and you use Google’s Adsense advertising to pay the bills, you may find the new rules can hurt your advertising revenue. The new feature is called “Negative site feature” and in short it allows advertisers to block their ads from displaying in specific sites. What this could result in, is huge blocks of the Internet being blocked because the advertiser is hoping to have his/her ad shown on huge portal sites rather then special interest blogs. It would be stupid to do this, because people that frequent special interest blogs and small focused websites are more likely to click a related ad then the generic audience that visits big portal sites. But stupidity is often conducive to people jumping to incorrect conclusions, so let’s hope this doesn’t hurt the small guys.
In other Google news, they are apparently trying to patent the technology behind news.google.com where articles are chosen based on “quality”. I’m against software patents myself, but I guess if the evil companies (you know who you are) are jumping all over them, the good guys should get a few as well for defence purposes if nothing else.
Lastly the Google web accelerator is generating allot of bad press due to privacy concerns and functionality issues. The privacy issues are related to the fact that when you use the accelerator, everything goes though Google’s system. The functionality issues seem to be mostly related to session management and remembered users/passwords. Personally I don’t really see the benefit of the web accelerator, and I worry about how it will affect online statistics generation.
My suggestion to Google is that if they want to produce a really useful, potentially profitable product, they should set-up a sort of “live cache” together with a DNS or linking system whereby webmasters that choose to, can arrange to have the Google live cache return their sites content in situations where a site has been “Slashdotted” (meaning hit by so many users that it can’t respond to them all and the site goes down.) They could do something like this in exchange for the display of some Adsense ads and the benefit to the webmaster is that no matter how much traffic they get, and how small their bandwidth pipe is, their content would always be available. To me that is a worthwhile service. I suspect many others would agree with me particularly since the Linux revolution is resulting in many users setting up their own websites on their own machines. After having been slashdotted recently by news.google.com and Yahoo together, I can really see the benefit of a system like that. It would be difficult to set up such a system, but the benefits of doing so would be worth it.
