The Privacy Implications of Google's Switch to First-Party Behavioural Targeting

With this sly regime going into the wild next month, the phasing out of third-party cookies will be no loss to Google. In fact, it will be a net gain.

Have you been puzzled by Google's casual resignation to the dwindling life of third-party cookies? What about the brand's shrug at anti-tracking initiatives like Mozilla's Total Cookie Protection? I mean, Google is Mozilla's primary funder. So at a glance it makes no sense at all that Mozilla's Firefox browser would roll out a system which limits the very tracking cookies Google uses to serve targeted ads...

Well, as with every other seemingly good-natured gesture that grandstands its way out of Silicon Valley, it's a trick. Of course it is. Just weeks after Firefox finally provides a default shield against cross-site tracking cookies (something it could have done 15 years ago), Google waltzes in with a new behavioural ad-targeting regime which... Yep, you guessed... Doesn't need cross-site tracking cookies. Not that any of this is choreographed, you understand... Sigh, groan, sigh, shake of the head, roll eyes to fade.

The Search Engine is Dying and There is No Cure

Google has locked itself into a range of self-threatening behaviours, which correlate closely with behaviours exhibited by other huge brands whose fortunes took a nosedive.

When Google recently determined that approaching half of Generation Z think websearch sucks and use social discovery instead, it reached for the panic button.

Naturally, the primary solution it came up with was "more surveillance". No surprise there. But as I predicted in mid 2015, socially-driven discovery is now a dire threat to Google's future. And worse, the momentum appears unstoppable. If the generational apathy towards classic websearch continues, we'd expect to see Google drifting into a vault of irrelevance by the time Gen Alpha substantially comes of age.

Google's Content Crisis

Google's ultimate undoing will not be some grassroots Web3 uprising, but something we can sum up in one word: content. And the content crisis has already begun.

Are you watching? If you've blinked at all since the summer you might have missed at least part of Google's desperate, ongoing quest to recover some semblance of quality in its search results. In recent weeks we've seen an unprecedented series of major updates to Google's search ranking algorithms, and it looks like the Californian behemoth is not stopping until the results pages start looking like someone gives a hoot.

AI WOES

The problem of the moment? Among other things, artificial intelligence. AI is now so clever and widely available that spammers can simply scrape the Internet, automatically re-word what they find, and mass-publish it without any worries about plagiarism or duplication.

Why You Might As Well Use Google: The Grim Reality of "Ethical Tech"

"That puts DuckDuckGo in the company of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Cloudflare, Megaupload, and wait for it... Pornhub. That is the general ethical standard we are talking about."

In the digital backwater that is alternative social media, we've come to expect a timeline punctuated with animated cries of “ditch Google!”. But ask for a rationale, and the orator will routinely point a nifty hyperlink at a piece of content marketing. A comprehensive damnation of Big Tech, fused with an all-important alternative recommendation. A slick word-parcel that either emerged directly from the lips of Eth Tech, or looks like it was financed with an Eth Tech backhander. So, what the heck is Eth Tech? You ask.

Is Google Analytics Still Fit For Purpose?

“Arguably, the number of real visits it fails to record is now so great as to render the tool's hit-counting prowess worse than an educated guess.”

One decade ago, any suggestion that something as eminently sophisticated as Google Analytics could be deemed unfit for purpose, would have categorised the suggestion-maker as something of a fruit loop. Offered free of charge, by a true leader in the tech genre, Google Analytics had become the gold standard in web traffic monitoring, and had found its way onto the majority of websites you or I would be likely to use.

Of course, GA does not only deliver data to the admins and owners of the websites who use it. It also delivers data to Google. And based on the “knowledge is power” principle, that phenomenal scale of insight into public behaviour has given Google an incredible advantage as a force in online advertising.

Google is thus desperate to maintain its standing in the analytics genre, but of late, things haven't been going quite as smoothly as the marketing world has been led to believe. In this post, I'm going to make the one-time sacrilegious assertion that Google Analytics may no longer be fit for its original purpose, and I'm going to explain why…

How Analytics Can Lose Your Business Sales

"It's all down to an analytics illusion, which shows that visits have increased, when in truth they've dropped. Here's how it works..."

How accurate is Google Analytics? Pretty accurate, right? I mean, it's Google. How could it not be accurate?

Well, it's certainly an extremely sound piece of tech. But what happens when people block it? This question takes us into a largely unexplored world of visitors I'm going to describe as "unrecordables". Unrecordables may not feature in your Google Analytics reports, but they're still very real, and just like your recordable visitors, they need to buy products and services.

Will Google Cancel Search Engine Optimisation?

It should not be possible, in the 2020s, for PR companies who have nothing to do with writing content, to increase the visibility of that content in the web search results. SEO, has to go.

Never does a day go by without some privileged and entitled soul on social media bitterly complaining about being “cancelled”. Stripped of their vast priority status and dumped into the mosh pit of desperate attention-begging with everyone else. After years of being idolised, they issue a monumentally bigoted comment, and the public suddenly wonders why this horrible, self-serving manipulator ever gained such affection in the first place.

Through the window left by the de-throned “influencer”, the public now sees better people, and thinks: why couldn’t we find this altogether more pleasant and giving world before?

The answer? It’s human nature to take whatever first appears in view. We’re lazy. We’re not going to spend time looking harder when we think we’ve already found the best of what’s available.

And it’s the same with search engines. We assume that the top results in a web search are going to be the best results, and we accept them, because why bother to go any deeper if the best comes up at the top?