Social Blunder

It's very humbling to know that even savvy guys like Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, can get it wrong.

He cites not reacting to the amazing growth by companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as being 'His biggest regret'. So even Google underestimated the impact of social media. Even better, when asked why he missed all the tell tale signs, he responded simply, 'I was busy' (as told to the WSJ).

It's easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day running of your company and, perhaps, the belief that the exciting world of technology revolves solely around you. Heaven knows that IBM were guilty of that in the 80s and Microsoft has been a repeat offender. Now we see Nokia stumbling over its own self-importance and paying the price in the smartphone arena.

It's a harsh lesson and one I will focus on in the build up to the opportunities The Cloud presents as you can feel the inertia in the channel already.

There's nothing like a challenge to the status quo to flush out the tree-huggers.

Google Android & Your Data

Eric Schmidt (Chairman of Google) has recently tried to allay fears that Google Android devices are accumulating our location data and backing it up to storage devices. He says that, 'Google is on the side of the consumer'.

Of course, Google would claim that we opt into such features. Note that whenever an Android App asks you to switch on your location indicator, such information is being relayed back to Google's servers and is stored - allegedly.

Microsoft have made great play on this - almost to the point of slander. But the reality is that they are not far wrong. Google claims that by storing and using such location data that it can produce 'Better targeted search'.

That phrase is in fact a euphemism for 'Making more money' - that is selling highly specific target information such as user location to advertisers so that they can more accurately tailor an advert to us and therefore increase their chances of a hit and possible sale.

As an example, just this morning I received adverts from Zoopla for postcodes near where I was sitting, not my home address. That's highly specific and very much dependent on my current location.

It is noticeable that Google tries to hide the fact that it will 'sell' the location information to advertisers and not a penny of that increase in revenue comes back to us as individuals. Perhaps, if Google wants to use this data in the future, we should charge them for every time they sell it or get a cut in the advertising revenue. After all, we are becoming the moving billboards upon which they can mount their adverts to woo us.

Google, as we are becoming aware, are not the nerdy, friendly cool guys we once thought they were. Their revenue figures and profitability are simply astounding. They are a fantastic money machine and we are the ones who make it happen.

We are all stakeholders in the Google phenomenon. Perhaps we should rise up and ask for our share of the money they are making out of us?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Microsoft - Crunch Time

If you are an executive at Microsoft right now, the next week or so is going to be pretty crucial.

On 22 October, Windows 7 is launched, the much vaunted latest version of the operating system. It is a crucial release because Microsoft, for the first time in its history, saw a backlash at its last major operating system release, Vista, when many large corporate customers decided to stay with the then current version, XP and still have. There were many technical reasons why customers did this but it caused tremors deep within Microsoft - was this the first ever user rebellion?

News yesterday will not have cheered Microsoft people. Google announced record quarterly profits at $1.6bn, a full 27% up on the same quarter last year and a clear sign, according to their Chairman, Eric Schmidt, that Google had exited the recession. A clear sign for the economy, perhaps, that the worst is over. But Microsoft people are hunkered down - after beating, cajoling, strong arming and any tactic they could find, they could force many home users to take Vista, but they could not force big customers to use it. It has now left them a massive problem.

The majority of PCs bought up until recently, came with Vista burned on the machine but they also had a downgrade option to XP. It meant a bit of fiddling around, but many users opted to go back a version of operating system to use a better, more established version. Clearly, Microsoft wanted to move all its development dollars to applications and a future based on the Vista lineage and so it had to make a huge gamble.

Here is the gamble - to benefit from using Windows 7, you can only upgrade from Vista. For all other users, you have to buy a new operating system, either with a new PC or just outright. It is not a gauntlet laid down by Microsoft to corporate customers, it is a simple, 'I told you that you had to move to Vista, now pay the price.'

Microsoft has been accused of massive arrogance in its stance on many occasions, introducing new versions of products where the file formats cannot be read in all versions causing big issues in the past. They have also been accused, more regularly, of hubris. Their products are still buggy with many simple things still recurring in products that have been within them for 10 years. They have been accused of stifling innovation as their products, with such a stranglehold on users, they force people to use the their products only.

Google were not the first company to come from nowhere and take Microsoft on but they are one of the few that avoided their usual responses to stifle competition and get not just a foothold but are now as big as them. The search engine was the linchpin but Google's view on the web challenged Microsoft's control of the PC from the opposite way. Google grew by revenue off the web, not the PC and it is its mantra today - and boy, have they been proved right.

For Microsoft, the next period in their history will be a white knuckle ride. They are going back to their base of PC users and they are basically waving a corporate two fingers at them to move to Windows 7 or get left behind - there is no intermediate choice. For Microsoft it is vital that users follow them as they cannot afford to keep developing products on multiple versions of their operating system - they have to get people to upgrade. Gone are the days of incentives on this - it's pretty succinct punch in the face.

I'm an XP user. I know that when the time comes I will be taking advice on what to do. The whole arena of operating systems has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. Now is as good a time as any, when I face paying for a full new operating system, to consider the advantages of Microsoft over its competitors or vice versa.

When was the last time we could have said that?

Why Is Google Trying To Be Nice?

Google has been in the press a lot lately after its spat with content providers like newspapers and then there was the launch of Streetview in the UK which did not go entirely to plan. So why is Google launching a 'charm offensive'? Is there something we should know?

When You're No. 1 There's Only Way To Go

It's pretty typical that when a company gets to No. 1 in it's market everyone wants to take a swipe at them. Just as when Microsoft first got there, people have started to get irked by Google's market dominance. There is, for example, an ongoing lawsuit over its efforts to digitise millions of books - a tentative settlement has been reached with cheesed off authors and publishers but anti-trust has raised its head and asked whether Google is able to profit from the arrangement.

Angry authors are not the only irate people. Advertisers are up in arms as they feel they have no bargaining power because Google controls over 70% of the search ad space. Lately there has been a case in New York which complains Google used its market position to destroy competition from rival search providers. It seems like Microsoft all over again - what happened to those squeaky clean nice guys who started this all? Where has the 'Coolness' gone in Google? Does every market leader HAVE to become big and nasty and the object of hate and suspicion?

Nasty By Default

It's a fact that when you're market leader, everything you do in order to maintain that position will in some way affect the competition. It's human and business nature for small players to try to get a share of the market and grow and they have to fight hard often to get some chips in the game. The problem arises though when market leaders become virtual monopolies. At that point, they effectively own the market and, if unrestricted, can dictate terms for all others while locking out new players by changing the rules. Microsoft has become a master of this and over the years it has seen off would-be new companies by bundling in alternative products into their operating system or by buying them out.

What Google has seen is the obvious result of making it big - regulators are ganging up on them and trying to question all that they do. Some of this is over-sensitivity to certain things while other concerns are very genuine. If I were an author struggling to get published and the only way was to use Google, then I can see that I might get a few bob but the lionshare by a mile would go to Google as they have the power to grab eyeballs.

And no matter what anyone says if you don't pay you don't get seen. Just this morning I checked on my website's traffic figures. I have the basic Google traffic package which is nothing and my ranking is 1 out of 10. It has been so for nearly 3 years. The ranking is based on the number of back links into the site. In the last year, I know for a fact that there have been over 500 new back links added on various sites linking to my website, yet the ranking has not moved one iota. You can find me on search if you look carefully, I have this blog which is linked to the site but it makes not a jot of difference.

Thankfully, I am not uptight about it but when I 'Google' other companies in my business it always irks me that the adverts seem to coincide with the 'Naturals' - the common inference is that you rise up the 'Naturals' if you pay. This makes sense - the more you pay for adverts, the greater the traffic to your website and then you will rise up the 'Naturals'. But after 3 years and umpteen thousands of hits and all those back links to my website, I have not moved at all.

Funny that.

Regulators On The March

Google got stymied on an ad tie up with Yahoo! last November. Streetview was taken down in the UK for a few days after complaints about invasion of privacy. There was even a feint rumour that the US Administration should break up Google for the good of the internet but I don't think there was any truth in that. To some extent, Google is a victim of its own success. It can't fund its competitors but it wants to grow. Almost anything it will do will be on a grand scale and almost certainly invoke criticism from one regulator or another.

Google Fights Back

Google has opted to fight back using 'charm'. It has an internal mantra of 'Don't be evil' but sometimes it's so hard not to ruin the business of a competitor because you want your piece of the action and when you control the whole search arena it is not just a piece, it's pretty much all the cake.

So the PR engine is in motion. Company executives are talking to advertisers, reporters, academics, and lawmakers to explain why, even though it's a virtual monopoly, it should be loved not feared. The problem is, as we know with companies like Microsoft, the more they try to charm you, the more you begin to suspect they are up to something nasty.

Google believe that Microsoft did not do much of a job on their charm offensive as they mishandled complaints around 10 years ago. In the big case of abuse of power surrounding Microsoft's browser there was, at one point, talk of authorities breaking up Microsoft as it did not seem to handle the complaints seriously enough. Google thinks it has learnt from this and feels it needs to pay attention and lobby those who are making such policy decisions. 'Have them on your side and there will never be an issue on break ups.'

Google is attempting to 'explain itself better' in the wake of criticism. It's just as well as, in February, a small search company called TradeComet launched a suit against Google. TradeComet, which relies on selling keywords to trigger adverts, purchased thousands of words from Google in order to drive traffic (oh, haven't we all tried that - to get anywhere it costs millions). But, it is claimed, when Google realised that TradeComet was a threat, by spooky coincidence the same keywords shot up in price. You might think that if a word becomes more popular then that makes sense and you would be right - but the price increase was tenfold. Inevitably, within a few months, TradeComet's monthly traffic declined by a staggering 90% and they lost $millions in revenue. It was Netscape all over again. Google's response was that they did not 'Think there was merit in TradeComet's claim'. Ouch.

Copyright

Google's attempts to digitise millions of books is at the heart of a copyright issue. Someone writes the words, Google profits. You might say that so does WH Smith by distribution and selling the books - after all authors would not sell much if all they did was stand on street corners with a pile of their books. But the issue is that Google has such a stranglehold on the content presentation market through its search engine that all authors, if they want to sell their books, must use Google. If that is the case, then every author will be competing to get seen and so the more they pay, the better their chances of being read and selling their books.

It isn't a great deal different to the way books are sold today and everyone is upset by new methods. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently criticised newspapers for being out of touch and that they have to adapt as Google does so much for the presentation of their product. But what it means is that the standard of reporting will be impacted if more of the profit goes to Google just because they have the stranglehold on the distribution.

They could become the modern 'Internet Teamsters' - if you don't pay us a percentage, you don't get read.

In the meantime, by digitising the books and redistributing them, authors lose control of the copyright. They no longer will get paid per view by selling the books but will probably sacrifice the potential gains. Moreover, this could signal the death knell for companies like Amazon.com who have done so much to revolutionise books and decrease the prices as they do not, yet, negotiate directly with major authors.

Google claims that any author is just a click a way and that claims over its search dominance are overstated. They now even dispute independent industry sources on web search when they rate Google with over 70% which is really silly.

In a separate round of scrutiny, Google's policy of allowing advertisers to buy a competitor's brand name as a keyword has been criticised. This is often seen when you 'Google' a particular product by its tradename, then up pops adverts from a competitor as they no longer purchase keywords associated with that industry, they simply purchase the tradename as the keyword. It means they skew their own ratings by doing so. There is also a claim that this is trademark violation.

It's a story yet to play out.

Privacy

Arguably, the biggest area of concern about Google is privacy and personal data. Google has vast quantities of our data gathered through search. It has launched iGoogle and has its GoogleApps which will store all our user-generated content in 'The Cloud', as it is known. The argument is that as Google dominates the market, we will all have less choice on where to store our data.

Many companies who believe their own products or services can keep user data more secure are being pushed out of the picture by Google's dominance. This also means that Google can use the information collected to its own exclusive advantage. What would be stopping it from profiling people and sending customised adverts or following them around on the web and then make personal offers to them? As they bought DoubleClick, the internet ad agency, they have the perfect vehicle for exploiting this. It may not happen - but the fear is unquestionable.

Google For The Future

Nobody doubts how fantastic a company Google is. It has revolutionised search on the web, it has made sure that superior technology has triumphed over Microsoft and we have got the best out of the web so far instead of what Microsoft would give us. But in doing so, it too has become a monopoly.

In answering the cases against it, Google has sought to deflect the suspicions of its activities by saying they are stoked up by its competitors. That's a bad sign as it seems that Google has also acquired the paranoia of a monopoly and lost touch with the world that does care if choice gets limited or data misused.

Google Conspiracy Theory?

Yesterday, I was rightly picked up on a few points in my article entitled 'Google's Gonna Get You' by SEO expert and entrepreneur, Mark Lewis and he was worried as to whether I was fuelling some 'Conspiracy Theory' on Google. I am not sure that is the case, as I have stated before, I am a huge fan.

But now that he has raised the subject, it is worth exploring that the company that has done so much for releasing the power of the web has big plans for the future. Whether those plans were the brainchild of the two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it is not clear. What is clear is that CEO, Eric Schmidt, is taking a greater lead in the company and perhaps he has a point to prove. Schmidt was the driving force behind Novell which had so many high hopes of being the dominant network player. Schmidt is an unusual man in Silicon Valley terms, he is one of the few, if not the only, people to become a $billionaire via stock options, perhaps he considers that to be the 'nearly man' route.

In the final quarter of 2008, Google had revenues of $5.7bn and made a profit of $382m, down from the previous quarter of $1.29bn - Google is a seriously huge and profitable company. And this revenue is almost all due to its search engine technology which creates rankings.

In theory, for any string of words you enter in the search box, Google will report back impartially based on its complex algorithms which work on raw data acquired by 'crawlers' which go through the vast amount of content on the web. This is called 'naturals' and is supposedly very distinct from the paid-for results which is the box of 3 or so main choices at the top of the page and the context sensitive adverts down the aide. To get higher up the rankings and so appear more regularly in the 'naturals', SEO experts advise the use of 'keywords' embedded in the html on your web pages - these are invisible to the readers but Google's army of crawlers knows how to find them.

For mortals like me, it's a confusing subject. My website and my blog contain my name and yet if you 'Google' it, only my LinkedIn and Ecademy profiles occur, no mention of the fact I submit articles to ezine, Newsvine or author a blog. In fact, only if you use the exact titles of my blog articles will you ever get to any of them, and that is by no means in all cases. Yet I have written over 200 articles and written hundreds and thousands of words. By contrast, Nigel Dunn, a jeweller in Worcester, a wood shavings expert and a song writer appear many times before I get a mention despite the fact at some points in my life I have been on national radio and quoted in National Newspaper articles as well as industry magazines (I haven't had my full 15 minutes yet by far, believe me).

It's a perplexing subject and, having been in involved in parts of the industry, I know that some companies specialise in getting you much higher up the 'naturals' and that costs money.

What Conspiracy?

No company becomes this big, this quick by being benevolent.

It is obvious and a commercial fact that those who pay the bills get the service and that is perfectly fair. Also, no company gets this big without aspirations to get bigger and, as usual, Google has Microsoft in its sights. Would this have been the strategy at outset by Page and Brin? I doubt it - they were kids who had a superb idea, had great fun making it work and getting rich beyond their dreams as a nice side effect. When Schmidt took over, things changed somewhat.

Google Apps was to be the way of the future. Google Mail is already a very interesting and useful take on email. Hosted entirely online by Google, it arranges mail by subject strings and it means it is far easier to search for things than, say, MS Outlook. Again, the founders' influence is very much at the fore. But things get a little hairy after that. Google Apps is all about hosting your entire set of office applications in 'The Cloud' along with all the content. Across the globe, a vast network of storage and servers, owned by Google, is being commissioned to support this. Some major companies have already switched to this new suite and embraced the 'devil' of hosted applications - they have fantastic economic and, for that matter, environmental advantages, which I have blogged about before.

Then up popped, iGoogle. This neat application sat as a dashboard/portal in your browser, it arranged and delivered your chosen content regularly to your PC. The weather, sports news, interesting industry snippets - you name it, you can have it. The trouble was, when you first downloaded the tool, there was an innocent looking option to allow your progress across the web to be recorded - by Google. The outcry was similar to the furore surrounding Facebook's bodged implementation of something similar. It was, in the view of many, an invasion of privacy in order to be able to make more money. In essence, this was true, but it did not fit with the shiny, friendly face of the Google we knew.

More recently, there has been furore about Google's addition to its Maps facility. Not only do we have terrain, road and the highly detailed satellite views but we now get cameras with 360 degree views of the areas at the addresses entered. Whinging civil righters felt this was an intrusion on privacy while there was a real case where a woman who had changed address to avoid a violent partner was in view outside her new home. Google's ability to fuzz out faces and number plates had not worked properly and some people or vehicles were recognisable. Of course, all views were freely available over the entire web.

In reality, Google Street View is a fantastic addition to already amazing facilities at Google Maps. I don't think anyone would really think theives are going to get better ideas on who to rob and where but they may check a target address as before. Terrorists aren't going to get any better idea of a place than a satellite view or going in person to check out an area. But for me, as a visitor to an office in Valencia next week, I could even check out what the road looks like, the office block and the parking facilities.

How cool is that?

Google and The Future

There is always a risk that companies who grow fast have to become more aggressive and grabbing on order to grow similarly in the future. Microsoft became an all-consuming ogre off the back of a virtual monopoly in the PC market and many, like myself, would argue they have some of the least innovative products on the market but get through by sheer presence, the old IBM way - you never got fired by choosing them even if the products aren't the best. Microsoft and IBM have shown that there is a time when you are big enough, that you can become complacent and the innovative edge wanes. Companies like Microsoft need to be challenged to keep moving and Google is certainly doing that.

But Google is different. There is still a nerdy, geeky feel about what you see. Presentation isn't everything at Google and the information is the important part still. They may be exercising too much muscle over the content providers like newspapers but we could equally argue they have had a good long run at things and maybe it is time to innovate more. Google genuinely is still providing excellent products and facilities and is clearly innovating at every step. It is still free to consumers in the main, corporates are different. I like 'The Cloud' concept and I have little fear of the idea of hosted applications and data - I have worked for two companies in that field and use datacentres and hosted applications extensively today. I disagree with companies that believe there is either a risk or that the web is unreliable - data outages on private networks are so common that people don't notice anymore while the web is obvious.

To get prominence on the web costs money and requires some skill - it's clear I haven't got enough of either to get my blog or website into real prominence. I have only been at it 3 years and still those crawlers and bots haven't found me. I don't blame Google for that - I'm just glad, like so many others, that I have a little pitched area of my own where people can find me if they look hard enough.

Unlike my net-colleague, Mark Lewis, I am cynical of the 'big company getting bigger' syndrome but like Mark, I think Google is a company to embrace rather than fear. There is no conspiracy other than to make money and bring cool services to all users.

Who could deny them that?

Google's Gonna Get You

I am a massive Google fan. I think they have done more to open up the web and unlock the information on it than any other company. It's all very well having browsers and content but finding what you need in the morass is what has made the web exciting, to my mind.

But all this comes at a price - despite the recession, Google clocked up $5.7bn in revenue last quarter and while profits dropped to $382m, they have made as much as $1.29bn of profit in Q3 of 2008. It is, by any measure, an extraordinarily profitable business.

One of its main functions is to aggregate content so that we can all easily digest information, like that from newspapers. While having amazing deals with newspaper firms which nets it enormous advertising revenues, papers are finding it hard. In a recent conference organised by the newspaper industry, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, was both critical of papers and criticised by them.

On the one hand, news companies saw the incredible revenues Google was making effectively off the back of their content, for which they have to pay handsomely to produce. On the other, Google believes that newspapers should revolutionise and get with the fact that they are useless at distributing their content. Schmidt criticised the newspaper industry for 'pissing off' its consumers and that Google were the heroes for distributing the content more effectively.

The Big Machine

Producing news is an expensive business, much more expensive than aggregating and distributing it. If someone delivered a paper to your doorstep which was just the information you liked as a synopsis of cuttings that would interest you from all papers in just one copy, small enough to digest the headlines but expandable if you want to read the detailed article, then that's what Google does. With it comes all that context sensitive advertising, carefully targeted to get us to click through and earn fortunes for Google.

It is, undoubtedly, a terrific service.

But it is just that. The content is what drives the interest and it's easy to forget that. I write this blog but the wider world beyond a clique of readers never get to see it as Google does not rate it and I do not pay them for anything. The result is that even if I have some practical advice for SMEs, beyond a few dedicated readers, the wider world never knows about it. If I wanted to expand my readership, I would have to pay Google to take interest. That does not stop them hosting the blog or popping adverts on the side. My content still earns them some money.

Google was described by one source from within the newspaper industry as a 'tapeworm', parasitically dependent on the content produced at great expense by the news industry. The consumers, though, want it all ways. I read the Telegraph from time to time because I like to do the crossword but if I want to find out about something quickly I 'Google' the subject and choose a prominent news story - it may not be the best written, the best informed or indeed written by a factual journalist in this country even, but it will be from the company with the highest Google rating which is ultimately driven by money.

The Future

Rupert Murdoch, that bastion of honest content and fighter on behalf of the consumer, has asked if aggregators like Google should in future pay for the content. It's a relevant question from the wily proprietor. There is a long term risk that if news is only ever presented on the web then Google and others will have all the power in terms of distribution whereas in the old days the news companies controlled the chain right down to the vendors in the street. It was easy to see how money could be made from news. Now it's not so clear.

Google always comes back to the 'fair use' argument - if this is what consumers want, why fight it? While newspapers would argue that the intellectual property rights to their content is being constantly eroded by having such ease of availability. The problem really boils down to, if content aggregation becomes the dominant way in which newspapers are distributed and read, then how will newspapers make money on their content? There is a small kickback of advertising revenue to newspapers, but you can rest assured that Google has the lion's share for itself.

Much of what is reported in papers is rehashed and blogged on - some bloggers making some pretty profits on the back of the original content. News opinion like mine, derives its subject matter from content on the web - I make no excuses for that. While I make no money from it, it would be quite an easy thing to do - so for once, I have some sympathy for the man who took away the Ryder Cup and stuck it on Sky.

News has always been big business and while ticker feeds like Twitter claim that it is the new way to spread word faster when terrible events occur, feeds such as Reuters have specialised in this for years. The power is that Twitter could create a new army of 'amateur journalists' across the globe who provide short, sharp news from source rather than rehashing news on line.

Or so we would like to think. It comes as no surprise that Google is rumoured to be targeting Twitter as a takeover. It is a short hop to believe that Google is then going to become not just the content aggregator but also content provider of millions of 'news' feeds.

The News Revolution

The problem for people like me is that in a busy day with other things to do, getting news needs to be in short bursts and I turn to quality sites like the BBC, Sky, Bloomberg and others to get my feeds. I have tried Twitter but it really is like sitting in a large room with thousands of people talking and maybe one person in the room, at just one point in the day says something of real consequence. The rest is just a blur of irritating noise. To get anything from it, you have to use the aggregation devices, many of which are available like Tweetdeck and these can even be fed to your mobile.

You can then 'follow' your Tweeters into the toilet, through the supermarket and down the golf course and see what they are doing, reading and knowing. The problem is that the VAST majority of the 'Tweets' are just nonsense and trivial to the point of pathetic. Like watching Big Brother, unless you are interested in the armpits of yawning contestants lounging on a settee talking garbage, Twitter provides you nonsense.

The world of news still is all about sifting through the mass of data and source bites and putting together something of interest - reporting both facts and content. Reading Michael Parkinson's superb analysis of Jade Goody's life in the Radio Times was brought to me by Google but the content was all Parky. Without his insight, and the thousands of writers who provide news content and make it interesting and informative, Google would be nothing.

We have this dichotomy all the time. My wife's Uncle, Terry Tyler, is a watercress grower and his cress is grown in the clean riverbeds between Sarrat and Chenies in Hertfordshire. He is not a big producer and he cannot afford the fees and chemicals to go 'organic' (perhaps another story of a sham industry awaits) but he uses no fertilisers at all to produce the most peppery and delicious watercress you will ever taste. You will never, ever buy it at any supermarket in the UK or even on market stalls in 'market towns' which advertise fresh, local produce. You will find it used by some of the top restaurants around Britain, however. The reason being is that he cannot afford to sell his product at supermarket prices as he hand grows and picks the lot. Despite knowing this, I still buy most of my watercress in supermarkets as it is more convenient, even though I am know I am buying inferior product and supporting large faceless suppliers who would put Terry Tyler out of business if they could.

We are a consumer society, and we want our product here and now, conveniently and cheaply. I think what will happen to news will be the same as has happened in Terry Tyler's industry - the value of the content will diminish and the value in distribution will grow. We will see a fall in quality but a gain in availability. No longer will stories arrive at us based on the quality of the journalism and the facts but on the who has paid to be at the top of the search.

Don't knock it, we asked for it.