In Those Google algorithms again John Evans about how Google doesn't really address the problems it creates with it's own expansion, and cites Robert Cringely who compares Google to The Next Microsoft: Google is learning too well from the master - I'm reminded that running a company mainly on Algorithms spawns problems and unforeseen consequences - which end up involving humans to mediate - often harshly and unfairly - and that seems to be happening more and more often, lately.

According to Robert X. Cringely:

"..As always, it comes down to the algorithm. Here's what Google has to say: "Depending on the design of the site, a parked domain site will be classified as either a search site or a content site. That means your ads may show on parked domain sites if your campaign is opted in to the search or content networks." So opting out doesn't always opt you out.

Then there is the expansion of Google Broad Match, which seems to be putting local (Geo-specific) ads on the results of national searches. This means if you run a bike shop in Charleston, South Carolina and someone hits your keywords on a search in San Francisco, Google may show them your completely irrelevant ad.

Google Personalized Search now uses the terms from previous searches to help fine-tune the next search, which seems good in principle, but if someone searches first on "childcare" then later on "insurance" they are likely to be served ads for insurance for children, which might not interest them at all.

There are other issues like problems with Google Analytics, and the blogosphere, if you know where to look, is full of this stuff (check my links to the right, please). But what's worst is that this is all taking place in the context of a Google customer support system that is effectively broken. They say it isn't broken, but if it takes weeks to get an answer, customer service is broken.

Google's defense, of course, is that the company will make everything right once you prove to them that they made a mistake. But Google is defendant, judge, and jury. And even if they face reality and do the right thing, it may already be too late for smaller advertisers. An algorithmic change by Google can result in AdWords budgets that worked well for years becoming suddenly depleted. All of the advertiser's money is gone, often with little to show for it. Worse still, there is no money left for ads that might generate revenue. Google says it will do the right thing, but doing that six months later has no effect for a merchant five months out of business.

Google appears to simply not understand this. Maybe with so many big jets parked at Moffett Field they've forgotten what it is like to run a business on little capital. Maybe they don't care.

At the heart of this problem is a flawed computer architecture that makes Google's customer service responses so slow. Google likes to pretend that its distributed architecture can handle anything, but that appears not to be the case here. When a change in the way Google does business bumps up the customer service load, the system becomes brittle and breaks. If Google acknowledges the problem, that generates more queries and the bad system gets even worse, so they say nothing. This isn't peculiar to Google, it happens at eBay, too, where they have to very carefully phase in changes for fear that partner reaction will bring down the system.

So Google says it will do the right thing and maybe even intends to do the right thing, but failures in its IT systems effectively keep it from doing the right thing, which brings us back to Microsoft, which has long been the poster child for inability to follow through because of IT failings.

It's an interesting perception that I'm hearing more and more - and I noted that my webmetricsguru.com blog (this one) got hit with a two point reduction in PageRank while my Artnewyorkcity.com blog, on John Evan's network, got raised by from a PR4 to a PR5, yet it's the same writer and I do the same things on both blogs - only my topics are somewhat different. 

My own comment is that different human reviewers looked at both both blogs and came up with different points of view - some liked what I do with Artnewyorkcity.com and rewarded me while others looked at Webmetricsguru.com on Know More Media and punished me - even though I did the same things, more or less, on both blogs.

What does that tell you?