Item No. 2. At Toilet.
Not so long ago Google rolled out the Caffeine update. The purpose of caffeine was to speed up the gathering of the World’s data so that Google could stick to its plan of documenting everything.
Google’s Mission Statement: Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Everyone was really impressed and lots of back slapping went on around the Google offices when they started indexing the Internet at approximately 5000 times faster than any other search engine.
But, and there is always a big but in these situations, something went wrong. Google soon realised that collecting all the information in the world was not much fun after all. Why? Because a lot of it was actually garbage and much of what was not garbage had already been collected and indexed 10,000 times from other sources.
So, what was Google to do? One option would be to abandon their mission to organise the world’s information. This would have been a noble U-turn had they decided to take this course. They are not a charity, they are running a business, and a rather successful one at that. No business can be successful just from collecting other people’s garbage. Although it is worth pointing out that in Kibera, Kenya, the worlds largest slum, the highest paid job is carry other people’s crap away in buckets during the night. At least that is what the BBC said.
Anyway, so what did Google do instead of a U-turn? Simple, it told the World to tidy their crap up. This is what Google said to the World;
“Look guys, we are trying to do you all a favor by telling you where your crap is. But we are fed up with sifting through all your sh!t. So clean it up and throw out your own rubbish from now on, as we are not interested. If you sort yourselves out we may come and start looking at your stuff again. Dude!”
Unfortunately Google have not been entirely clear how they define crap. They know that they don’t want it anymore but they don’t want to tell anyone what it is. There is still a lot of crap getting indexed. Only today I saw another co.cc domain scraping my content, Google Alerts told me so. So Google is still scraping the crap off the scrapers sites and doing something with it. Maybe not putting it in the search index, but they are emailing it to me!
The hunt for my crap continues. I am finding bits behind the sofa and down the back of the radiator, but not really finding anything obvious. I wish Google would tell us what our crap is so that we can play ball. At least when I tell my kids to tidy up, we all know what the clear carpet looks like so have something to work towards. On the Internet, it is just a guessing game. Ho hum.
Hmmm, this article is 479 578 words long. Is that enough? Oh, no internal links, need to add some, but not too many ….. damn, no images. Arse, I swore! Eeek! Oh well.
PS. When I wrote the title, the toys in mind was the traffic and revenue earned from advertising. But I went off on a tangent and started talking about slums and poo.
PPS. PS’s are not needed in electronic documents like this as they can be edited. Probably a few more Pagerank Quality points deducted.
