| Things Google Should Do: Recommendations From a Blackhat Posted: 06 Dec 2011 06:43 PM PST There's been quite a few posts by Aaron lately about the things Google is doing wrong, so I figured I'd help Google out and give my boys running the most dominant tech company on Earth a couple of ideas on some things I'd love to do. Who am I? I'm just an anonymous blackhat with too many ideas. You see, I lack the scale and lobbyist army to pull off giant game-changing feats, so rather than just waste a fantasy I think Google could turn them into blackhat realities. - Sell illegal drugs. There's a reason people sell drugs: money, and lots of it. Rather than do the usual narcotics though, I think Google could specialize in flinging massive amounts of pharmaceutical grade contraband…you know, the kind of stuff you need to see three doctors, a pharmacist, and a priest for. And the best part is, if they continually sidestepped large pharma companies by pushing the product via misspellings of the brand name drugs, they could get away with it for like 5 years. No one would ever know! Oh, they did that? Yikes, the DOJ? Ok, moving on.
- I'll just chalk that up to them getting pinched for selling a legitimate product, a big brand turf war if you will. If that's the case, Google should invest in figuring out all the top ecommerce KWs and give the list away to oversees peddlers of counterfeit goods. It isn't drugs, but that Gucci knock-off at close to Gucci prices sure has a good margin on it when you're artificially inflating CPC bids with phony quality score demotions. They should get right on that. Man, I am behind the curve again! Don't worry G-men, I'll wink and nod while you "aggressively" crack down on these searches that take less than 5 seconds to find.
- Well, ok. They sold drugs and fake goods already. I suppose they could always profit from their Adwords customers multiple ways by interrupting the landing page destination process a few percentage points of the time and…I GOT IT…they could somehow use their ridiculously ubiquitous toolbar base to provide a "feature" that invites the end user to compare the price of the product the advertiser worked so hard to attract and paid Google directly for. Man these guys are good…er…bad. I'm getting jealous here. This is like Goldman Sachs execs in the extreme north 1% making a ton of money advising a client like Greece (the Adwords customer in this case) and then actively profit in the demise of that client by shorting its bonds (by using Google Related to earn that secondary revenue stream). HAHAHA. Oh man, the only way they could have done that any more beautifully is if the recommended pages were somehow funded by Google Ventures and crammed full of Adsense and Viglink.
- Speaking of toolbars, I don't think they are leveraging that toolbar install base enough. Yeah yeah, it is a browser extension or plug-in technically, and is governed by a fairly narrow permissible use TOS. But still, wouldn't it be cool if they used it to hijack an install process onto various OS? That way they could push out all sorts of malware, spyware, and adware and maybe even circumvent the OS itself to push people into Chrome OS. Holy crap, that's so awesome – take that Apple!
- Come on, like Apple is a saint. We were all thinking of doing it. An OS is nothing though; what really turned Apple around as a company is its iPhone. If Google could have gotten advanced knowledge of its development behind a string of NDAs and a maybe a seat on Apple's board in order to quickly produce a near identical product; that would be something. Oh. My. Schmidt. What's even classier is refuting a dead man's words and calling his final dying passion a lie. Siri, get me a lawyer. LOL
- Eric Schmidt and the crew do make awesome spies; I can't compete with that. I'm concerned that they aren't spying enough though. Hey, wouldn't it be swell if Google used those fancy street map cars that take naked pictures of me in the front yard and do something really special? I'm thinking grab EVERYTHING within signal range; the best way to make sure someone is using Google is to grab their router login, hack the logs, and check. My friends, I am in awe of your blackhatishness. Nmap is pretty cool huh G-men? Did you install some warez bots too while you're in there?
- Warez and crackz shouldn't be scoffed at. Lots of traffic volume from China and Eastern Europe are from people looking for these things. Who cares if its illegal; if the first 6 things listed didn't stop my law-skirting buddies at Google, I don't think silly little copyright laws should slow them down.
- And nothing should slow down the progress of making our kids literate, for a nice cut of the profits of course. The way I see it, Google is good at getting other peoples' content; what if they just took all the books in the world and copied them? I bet the authors wouldn't even blink an eye, since they just want their works discovered anyhow. Wahhh, you stole something I worked on for 3 years and put it on the web for "free" until ads are wrapped around it and I'm completely cut out of the process. Wahhh.
- If the author's guild didn't even put a chink in the armor, Google's Wolfram and Hart trained biz dev team may as well get more aggressive. Clearly no one has the teeth to make them obey any sort of law. Killing search dissenters is probably a little early in the game plan (table that for 2014), so why not just kill business models instead. Coupons? Nuke Groupon by launching your own product that uses Adwords data from Groupon's campaign to fuel offer intelligence. That isn't good enough though; what if they took a huge information repository, flat out scraped it, served it up as their own, and then penalized the guys they took it for with a duplicate content penalty. Wow man that'd be hilarious. Well, Matt Cutts did say roughly 40% of the DMCA complaints are phony. That's probably just the case. ;)
- DMCA got me thinking. All us SEOs are saying video is the next big wave of spam, so what Google really needs to do is pirate the video web in order to get ahead of the curve. Well then, surf's up.
- Killing is probably still out and coveting other people's oxen seems kind of low margin, so maybe they could just steal some more stuff. Scraping has been done to death, but maybe they could steal software from others, sell it as their own, and hope they don't notice. Too bad you got caught, but then 'oracle' does sort of imply they could see it happening in advance.
You know what…Google is doing way better than I ever could, mainly because being a blackhat mostly means doing boring things like buying links, not engaging in the kinds of criminal activities listed above. Kudos my dark arts brethren; you've taken this to a level that would leave me behind bars, and yet you STILL have people believing you are the stand against all that is evil. You truly are masters of deception; here, I have new logo for you.
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| Google Biz Dev Beats the Google Engineers Again Posted: 06 Dec 2011 04:42 PM PST Since Panda has happened I (and others) have highlighted how brands have ranked doorway pages, ranked scraped 3rd party content, padded out crap "content farm" content to suck in search traffic, took their market leading position & used it to deliver inferior experiences, bought out bankrupt competitors & redirected the PageRank, engaged in off-topic affiliate extension (Barnes & Noble, Overstock, Overstock AND Barnes & Noble), etc etc etc At the same time, independent webmasters face greater uncertainty than ever (legal, personal property rights, and from alleged "quality" algorithms like Panda & editorial crackdowns from Google engineers). If you are not operating at scale, you are an inefficiency which must be expunged from the marketplace. I have maintained that Panda was a joke & a diversion to re-frame the quality debate as Google dialed up on inserting their own vertical results in the search results, allowing them to monetize the "organic" search results. Such a view may have been seen as cynical, but it is something that more people are realizing as true. Read this great article from Tom Foremski on ZDNet. Google's percent of downstream traffic to YouTube has more than doubled since Panda. You know how John Stewart or George Carlin have to present reality as a joke to express it? Well watch the above video & then read this article: "Every single leading company is waiting for user-generated content or is licensing content" in order to reach advertisers, Rosenblatt said. "YouTube was tired of waiting. They told us that they needed a home and garden channel, a pets channel and a health/Livestrong channel. They are paying us up front, plus a rev share. This is the beginning of them funding professional content creators."
I have mentioned Demand Media's video "efforts" before.
 But my opinion doesn't matter. As a monopoly, only Google's does. And they decided to subsidize Demand Media while torching your site.  |
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