Living in Google’s World

There is an interesting article in today’s New York Times “Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Websites.” The article explores how changes to Google’s algorithm affect smaller websites and whether or not this reflects antitrust violations as Google is moving into competitive areas such as online commerce and local reviews. The article profiles one company, Nextag (a shopping site), that unceremoniously dropped in the organic search results and saw their traffic from Google drop in half. As a result they had to increase their Adwords spend to stay in the customer’s consideration set. The article says that Nextag saw their traffic breakdown change from 60% free and 40% paid two years ago to 30% free and 70% paid today. They attribute this not only to the changes in the organic search algorithm but also to the way paid search and Google shopping results are moving the organic results further and further down the page. I think the article raises a lot of interesting questions about small businesses who are dependent on Google for traffic and are now competing with Google for the same customers. It will be interesting to see what the FTC decides to do and how that will change organic and paid search.