nce upon a time — actually it was a few short years ago —
Google decided to sell ads. They called it "contextual advertising," and
today it accounts for 99 percent of their revenue. But all is not well in
Googleland. Thousands upon thousands of sites, with millions and millions
of pages, had been trying to rank well in Google's search engine even
before Google sold ads. Now these same spammers can get paid for their
spam by slapping Google's ads on them. The entire web went downhill so
fast that Google lost its ability to sort out the spammers from the real
content. But Google didn't care, because their cut for all of those ads
came right off the top. The more spam there was, the richer Google got.
One year after going public, their market capitalization is neck-to-neck
with Time Warner.
No, it was just a small handful of watchers who wondered about that market cap. Now you can join them effortlessly. Just hotlink to our little GIF at www.scroogle.org/gifs/evilb.gif on any page on your website that has a light background. It's a transparent GIF (88 x 53), so it won't be very visible on a dark background. The number for Google's market cap gets updated throughout the day when the stock market is open. Your browser will probably cache this GIF and you might not see the update. On some browsers, even if you refresh the page, the links to images on that page might not get refreshed. You may have noticed that on Scroogle's home page, our link to this same GIF is rather complex. We call a script to dump the GIF to the page, and at the same time we slap a new number on the end of our link to our script. This fools every caching scheme out there into thinking it's a brand new image, while our script just ignores that number. But this is much too complex for most webmasters. We don't know of an easy way to solve this problem. However, the problem may not be that significant. Most of your visitors are probably not returning to your page, which means they will be fetching the latest number from our site. And even if they have a version of the GIF in cache that's a few days old, the number won't be too far off unless the crash is already in progress!
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But some folks thought it might be another bubble. Not any of Wall
Street's analysts, of course, because they get rich off of bubbles.
Not the geeky media pundits either, because Google was always good
for a trite hack of a story about "innovation." And not most bloggers,
because they are too self-absorbed, and they hate everyone who supports
privacy rights on the Internet. That's because in many cases they opted
out of privacy the minute they started their blogs. Google's privacy
issues seem mild by comparison.
By linking to our "market cap watcher," webmasters can help their
visitors follow the continuing drama of how Google lost its way.
Do what you want with any linking behind the GIF. You can even link
to Google, for all we care — we're not evil.