91–100 of 134 posts
It really hasn't been covered enough just how much Google has replaced organic search results with their own features. In some cases it's almost all of the above the fold real estate and for shopping they are starting to take over the checkout experience as well. It's significantly reducing organic traffic and turning e-commerce sites into Google suppliers.
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Not to get too off topic, but it's clearly a self inflicted problem, where nobody would complain about spending money on space force uniforms if space force's existence made any sense.
Why does militarization of space not make sense? It makes a lot of sense unless you're a pacifist.
Few dispute the military should have some people who do space stuff, many dispute that they should be on equal footing administratively to the rest of the military.
> For now, the 16,000 active-duty airmen and civilians who work at Air Force Space Command will be assigned to the Space Force, but nothing else will change. Uniforms, a rank structure, training and education are all to be determined, and for the foreseeable future, Space Force will continue to be manned by airmen...
> Meanwhile, U.S Space Command, which stood up in August, will continue to exist as a combatant command, similar to Cyber Command, Special Operations Command and others.
> Barrett will be the Space Force’s service secretary, as the service will be nestled within the Air Force Department, the same way the Marine Corps is part of the Navy Department.
> Eventually, she said, those services’ space commands will be rolled into Space Force, and those personnel will transfer branches. In the more immediate future, officials said, soldiers and sailors could be detailed to Space Force.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-military/2019/12/21/...
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1 more thought on this - Expedia and Booking are next on their menu...
Expedia had a bad last quarter and blamed it on Google. Booking has a good quarter and said they did a better job with retaining visitors to skip Google.
When I arrived the hotel had all my credit card detalis printed on a paper that was just sitting there.
Never booked again trough that site.
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Whenever I want to look up the highlights of a place, I look up it's Lonely Planet page. They are written well and have good pictures. The way to compete against a million random reviewers is by upping quality and forming a brand. In some places, Lonely Planet is the only company providing accurate and complete information. It's marvelous.
Unfortunately Lonely Planet's old business model of getting people to pay for content itself has basically stopped working now that there's a million free digital competitors, and they've yet to come up with a replacement that does.
Reposting myself on the subject[1]: For anyone not aware (or confused by Silicon Valley tradition on constantly rewriting origin stories), TripAdvisor started in the dot com bubble as a B2B site. They clearly stated their business model was to provide reviews to other sites. Only that after the bubble burst, TripAdvisor had none left. They then basically invented modern SEO: long descriptive URLs, pages pulled out of…
This comment ads nothing of particular value. TripAdvisor, just like many of the businesses that thrived around Google and search engines in general, use SEO to promote their own services. Nothing wrong with that. The wrong bit here is that Google is acting as a dangerous monopoly, disregarding privacy and as of recently, shamelessly stealing markets from its own customers. Few years ago in Europe it was sanctioned f…
This is what happens when you pay huge amounts of money on Google Ads and traffic. They notice that you must be quite profitable if you afford to pay so much, so they come for your market. It will happen more and more and the more you pay to Google the more you help them take you out of the market.
Actually this is all about Amazon. Apparently in some countries users are going to straight to Amazon for their shopping searches and bypassing Google entirely.
Google is pretty much taking your shit nowadays and there is nothing you can do about it. That shit is either a company you built or a product of theirs that you used. They are not a search company, they are a conglomerate. They'll buy you or break you. It's funny when they fail though isn't it? Remember Google+? Who lead that initiative? What a travesty that was. Outside of Gmail, Google's UIs really do suck. But ba…
Google is pretty much taking your shit nowadays and there is nothing you can do about it That sounds like Amazon -- if you've got a hot selling product on Amazon, you can expect them to copy it and start selling it under the Amazon brand: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/got-a-hot...
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They are no angels either, or at least their daughter company. Two weeks ago TheFork featured in Dutch TV program Rambam where they proved that they boost restaurant ratings. They listed their own fake restaurant (possible, no problem) and gave their own reviews, trying to become lowest rated in the ranking. Giving rebates on couverts may boost your ranking too. Restaurant owners interviewed are not too happy as well…
I used to work on the search team at TheFork years ago (we were already a TripAdvisor subsidiary) and don't know about the current practices but back then there was no foul play about the ratings, which is not even the default sorting on the site. Also, not specifically related to TheFork (because I don't remember...), do all ratings should always have the same weight? Are old ratings as relevant as newer? If you wan…
I really prefer TripAdvisor data and reviews, but it is really difficult to compete to a monopoly. Google also is better at search and integrates better with their own service. If at least they would allow me to download any city data in advance in their app. It used be possible to download the main cities in advance, but now you must have internet always on. They think that in any country you have internet everywher…
They’ve been a lot more helpful than Yelp reviews etc., too.
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Google is eating the travel industry. Search for anything travel related and you get pages of Google products and advertising widgets before you get to the first organic result. The change over the last 5 years is huge.
When I first found Google flights a couple years ago it was ahead of all the other trip aggregators and unbelievably cheaper too. I think it forced the cheapo tickets craze because I had never seen $50 cross country tickets before that, and it practically destroyed all the little deals and gentlemens agreements that the other aggregators undoubtedly had.