Google’s track record with social networks hasn’t been awesome. If I was in their shoes, I would say the same thing, just in case it flunks like the rest of it. “ooh no, we’re not competing against Facebook or Twitter… No. Good heavens, no.” Yeah right.  Like Douglas Adams said: “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.”

Don’t get me wrong, with all those sour sounding grapes, I like Google+ (and grapes). Granted, my liking Google+ has a lot to do with my dislike of Facebook and boredom of Twitter. I just wish Google didn’t confuse people further with this “not a social network” business. People have just gotten comfortable with Facebook and the idea of social networking sites… Let’s just leave it at that. You have reinvented the wheel, and that’s great. I’m loving some of the features of Google compared to Facebook and Twitter… (See, comparisons are inevitable because it is so similar.) I especially like Circles and the fact not everyone need to be mutual friends.

So there. Quack.

The PR-rating, as most of you know, is relevant to how many links are pointing back at your site. It’s kind of a popular vote sort of thing. It is not entirely reliable though, as you can “vote yourself” as many times you want by creating back links – sometimes by hiring tons of people to post links on unrelated blogs on your behalf.

What I would like Google to do, is to offer an option to search without PR. I understand that in some cases PR is actually a good indicator on what quality websites we’re looking at, but on other instances… I would at least like the chance to search the web on the site’s own merits alone, take out the back link effect completely. As, there might be a site created yesterday that is far better than another site created 10 years ago which has tons of back links by the age only, but that actually offers more value to the visitor than the old site.

So, I don’t need to tell you anything about SEO, except that here’s a very helpful SEO guide that will tell you most anything you need to know about search engines.

Nowadays, everything is “optimized” for Google. When I use it as a search engine, I no longer receive the most relevant pages, but the results of the best SEO-experts out there. It’s like the Olympics where the players use the best drugs that test can’t reveal yet. It SUCKS. It’s UNFAIR to everyone.

Google has again changed the rules on how they index pages, and what do they do? They announce to everyone that this and that no longer apply! Good heavens, Google! You have a big mouth and you need to learn when to shut up! Just tell people you have completely renewed your algorythms, and you are not going to reveal what they are. Sure they can still try to make their searches rank high, but you’ll have the advantage of being ahead of the game and serve relevant searches.

You will probably get webmasters turn away from Google and optimize for Bing instead, but the thing that made Google popular back in the day wasn’t webmasters, but people who found what they were actually looking for without some second class writer with first class SEO knowledge thought we should be looking for. I for one will be doing my searches elsewhere until you learn to shut the fuck up.

It was a good run while it lasted Google, but now I’m going back to Altavista. Who uses Altavista anymore?! I hear you ask. Exactly. When I did a few searches with keywords I often use and run websites for, my sites ranked as I would expect them to on Altavista, where as Google didn’t even blink. I know these sites are of high quality, but they are not obsessively search engine optimized and as such, Google didn’t take much of a notice of them. Altavista on the other hand ranked them fairly, where they were supposed to be as the last entry of the first page they were, and where they were supposed to be on the top, they were. I normally do SOME SEO, put in keywords and page descriptions – when I think I should – and put in links to my sites where I think it would be helpful for people but I’m not spending hours on end on link building and trying to improve my Google and Alexa rankings. So there you have it. Who would have thought.

The politicians say this is to protect the children from harmful content on the internet. They want to filter out anything that is inappropriate for a 15 year old or younger, according to the ACMA regulations. Why don’t you just pass a law that parents have to install a content filter for their own computer if you insist on the child safety issue?

And if it is a ploy to protect the children, what about us that have none? If we want to watch porn online we should be allowed to! What about non-filtered ISP’s for people who don’t have children? Should parents who have children be still allowed to access the net unfiltered if they are not concerned with the “baddies” or are capable to filter the content themselves.

I agree that it might be wise to OFFER a filtered service, but should it be compulsory? Good heavens, no. That just as a mere thought is appalling and sends the message of a 3rd world country out to the rest of the world. Even if it did bring no relevant harm to the user, the mere thought of a filtered Internet goes against everything I believe in, and while the world is getting more and more tolerable and liberal, this kind of approaches don’t really go down do well in International image of Australia. Internationally, people won’t be interested HOW Australia does it or WHAT is filtered, all they will hear is “Australia sensors the Internet just like China” and that’s it. China, I tell you. The country that forged a child’s singing voice.

Now if you have ever seen the Google keywords and phrases that your blog is picked up with as search results, you may also raise this question. If my blog is found with phrase “child nudity porn” is it then filtered out completely? Rest assured, nowhere on this site, or any of my other sites, have I published child porn, but clearly, I have used the word, child, nudity and porn in one place or another, sometimes even in the same post. HOW is this content filtered anyway?

What really grosses me out on this is having moral values forced upon me, in a free democratic country! The Internet is the place where you can find support, friends, soul mates and be free & yourself, and that should include the possibility of viewing and sharing material that some people would find objectionable. Should this filter be installed, who will then control what is filtered out? One day it’s adult content, the next day it’s anti-religious material and then political issues… Content warnings on TV are enough to piss me off, but I understand them. TV cannot be filtered on a device level, but your computer can. I think we should keep it at that.

More on the topic by politicians and by Aussie Bloggers.