People who liked to spend their time clicking on links to see whether those links lead to something, less curious
Did Google, the world’s largest web-search engine, peak last November 6th, when its share price hit an all-time high of $742? Some people on Wall Street seem to think so. They now value the firm at around 40% less. Part of the blame belongs to the general turmoil in the stockmarket. But the bigger part, investors fear, is that Google, at the ripe old age of nine, might already be over the hill.
The scare started when comScore, a research firm, reported in late February that Google’s “paid clicks” had decreased by 7% during January, and were flat compared with the same month a year earlier.
In other words, surfers who searched the web via Google itself, or who visited websites that belong to Google’s advertising network, clicked slightly less frequently on the little text advertisements that Google often places on these pages. The idea that this disappointment was some sort of seasonal blip faded on March 26th when comScore reported that the numbers for February were no better. The search engine seems to have stalled. (…)
The ratio of paid clicks to searches dropped even faster than the number of paid clicks: it was down by 16% in the month of January.
{ The Economist | Continue reading }
Well, for one thing, you’re kind of pompous and self-centered and people don’t like you, and worse, you’re a terrible CEO and you don’t have any clue about how to run that place and in fact you’re not running it, Larry is, but just the fact that you all have to pretend that you run it speaks volumes about how messed up the place truly is. It’s not a company, it’s a cult. (…)
You’ve got these weirdly smart and semi-nasty super-spoiled children who really believe they’re superior beings who shouldn’t have to work too hard and who really don’t take criticism well (because they’ve never received any in their sheltered little lives, and it just totally knocks them on their ass) and on top of all that they are almost entirely incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. You’ve got an entire corporate culture built on ADHD and entitlement. Nice work, frigtard.
Plus you make a big deal of only hiring these super-high-IQ kiddies and the fact is that most of them truly are smart, but then you put them into this horribly dull and easy drone work on AdWords and AdSense. (…)
And you know what? There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world’s smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently.
{ fakesteve.blogspot | Continue reading }
Add another one to the list of Google employee departures: Google VP Engineering Douglas Merrill has resigned, and will be joining UK and NY-based big music label EMI Group as President.
