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Comment by jaxc | Hacker News Reader

If Mahalo is alleged to be a scraper site then just let Google handle it.

If you think about, if Google delists the site then thats probably their business model gone because Google is like 60% of search Market in the US and higher else where so if Google delists them and take away their Adsense then they are in trouble.

So let them taunt Google all they like and then see what happens when the Google Dragon wakes up because it won't be pretty.

(Edited for typos and readibility)

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Aaron is basically acting as their Ombudsman right now. Google will probably lose some serious revenue from that, because they get a big cut of what Mahalo generates. If Google lost that ad revenue for some other reason, the person responsible might well be fired for it.

When Aaron Wall hounds them over it, they'll be more likely to make the right decision.

Google does something like $18Bn per year in revenue and of that about $750MM-$1Bn is from ads on non-Google-run sites.

So, I think they care about Mahalo as a source of revenue about >< that much. They're probably more worried about possible anti-trust actions if they just drop Mahalo -- I bet that would shave more off their market cap than losing Mahalo as a customer.

This is incorrect. AdSense was 31% of their revenues in Q409. They did more than $2B in AdSense revenue in Q4 alone:

http://investor.google.com/releases/2009Q4_google_earnings.h...

I was working from this: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-...

Those numbers are net sales, not gross revenue, so cost of revenue (revenue splits, traffic acquisition costs, etc.) are factored out.

Goog's 60% market share is understated, too. Yahoo and Bing often point search results back to their own networks (Yahoo & MSN respectively). So third parties like Mahalo probably see Google driving much more than 60% of their search traffic on average.

For me Google usually brings 88-92% of SE traffic, that's the same for most people. Google is understating their market share, because essentially they have a monopoly, and if that was widely known, they'd be regulated in no time.

I normally see north of 80 on the sites I work with, but I have never seen as high as you have gotten.

it's mostly due to indexing, Google has a few thousand pages indexed, while Bing and Yahoo have a few hundred

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