Seeing Google from a new perspective
My personal opinion of Google is that it is out of control and has a real chance of bringing the Nasdaq back down when it finally crashes. I also recognize that many website owners are thrilled by the amount of money they are making from running Google ads. Their perspective is worth exploring. When my RubyRiver aggregator is ready, I'll be including Google ads on the pages. I'm also going to be buying a small number of ads on Google to promote this site. These are both experiences that I need to understand. All of my web advertising experience is with banner ads. We ran millions of banner ads a day on the Andover.net sites with our own sales people and code, but we never used Google's ad system.
Another aspect of Google I want to learn more about is search engine optimization. This is a shadowy world that seems to be a magnet for hucksters. We did some of this at Andover, but nothing of the sophistication available today. One of the many ads that appear on Google when searching for "adwords" is:
I made $20,000 online last month.
You don't even need a Website.
