What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [19]
I’m not arguing that everything online should stay distributed. When little bits of information and commerce spread out everywhere, they become hard to find. There is a need to aggregate them again—and a business opportunity there. Google News and Daylife (where I work) collect and organize headlines from all over the web so we can find all the latest news from anywhere. Some newspapers object to being aggregated. I believe papers should beg to be aggregated so more readers will discover their content. Daylife has taken headlines and put them in pages and widgets that sites can, in turn, distribute again. This pattern of distribution and aggregation is the yin-yang, push-pull of the distributed web: You want to be distributed, then aggregated, and then distributed again. You want to be found.
New Publicness
If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found
Everybody needs Googlejuice
Life is public, so is business
Your customers are your ad agency
If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found
Once upon a time, all roads led to Rome. Today, all roads lead from Google.
Google defines what your web presence should be. Of course, you need a web site. Who doesn’t? But don’t look at your site as a place where you get your message across. Don’t obsess on a fancy home page and a path of navigation you want users to take (and please don’t play music when I get there). Remember that many or most people won’t see that home page. Most will likely come to you through Google after they ask a question.
The question is: Will you have the answer? That’s how you should think of your site: answers for every question you can imagine, each on a page that is clearly and simply laid out so both Google and busy readers can find it and figure it out in an instant. If you’re a manufacturer, customers should be able to find product details and support in an instant. If you’re a politician, voters want to know your stands and record. If you’re a food company, buyers want nutritional information. If you’re a clothing company, shoppers want you to give the information a good sales clerk would—does this run large? Where can I buy your product? How do I contact you? Your users are already telling you what they want to know. Have your web folks show you the searches people made in Google when they clicked on a link to come to you. That is your starting list of questions to answer.
I learned about watching Google queries from About.com, the first media company made for the Google age. A vast majority of its traffic comes from Google. A large proportion of its ad revenue also comes from Google. About.com might as well be a division of Google, but it’s not. It’s merely built on Google’s platform. About.com is owned by The New York Times Company, which bought it in 2005 for $410 million (and hired me to consult there). I’ll confess I was dubious about the acquisition when it occurred, but I was wrong. Today, as papers struggle in the new economy, About.com is one of the rare bright spots in any newspaper company’s P&L.
About.com at first wanted to compete with Google or even to be Google. Started by Scott Kurnit as The Mining Company in 1997—a year before Google was incorporated—its goal was to provide a human-powered guide to the internet. But as Yahoo also learned, that was hard and expensive, especially as the internet grew so unfathomably large. The company was rechristened About.com and became a content service with 700 sites