The Email I Received from Google in 2007 When They Wanted to Buy Zilo (2012)
berrebi.org
berrebi.org
When I’ve taken a job at Zlio.com in 2007 to start their US operations, with Jeremie Berrebi as a CEO, I was really excited by the growth I was seeing. All signals were green : users, revenues, traction, VC funding. They had it all.
A week after I joined the company, Google sandboxed us, and we’ve lost 90% of our traffic. After months and months of work trying to solve our inbound traffic issue, we pretty much all gave up and decided to move on to other things.
Is it possible they were doing blackhat SEO, which got them banned from Google?
Otherwise, this sounds pretty damning for Google. I'm just trying to think of alternative theories. It seems like if Google were willing to act this way, they'd have a history of doing so. Do they?
EDIT: Yes, probably spam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755386
We gave to all of our members/stores owners the possibility to customize their store template.
Also, i was a zilo user back in the time, and really liked it. Glad things turned out well for you !
Wix and Zlio: We had the same investor. Mangrove. They discovered Wix when they came to Israel for a Zlio Board. They know own 25% of Wix.
Two startup founders who developed voice recognition software were negatively affected by tweaked search engine page ranking of ChumHum after refused being acquired.
Coincidence?
They probably were doing something that would raise a flag at Google, but the Googlers knew how to get around that. So they let the app run, then let the system kill it. Meanwhile, they could do something very similar that would not raise the flag, and it'd work.
It's not intentional, but if you work down the hall from the guys who control a ton of web traffic and others who are responsible for app security, it helps. One might even say that it becomes an unfair competitive advantage.
They posted that on their Adsense blog 1 month before the blacklisting : http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/08/adsense-api-on-e-commerc...
They have a rich history of stomping on little guys as well as being a masterclass in the, "do what I say, not what I do" sort of hypocrisy that always seems to come from those with great power. In my eyes, they've long lost the benefit of the doubt when it comes to matters like this. Google holds a lot of utility for me and I use their products daily, but I hold no illusions as to their predatory nature.
1) Google has claimed non-existent partnerships with their competitors in direct marketing of a competing product. They were literally calling their competitor's customers on the phone, saying they were a partner of the competing company, and hard selling that company's customers to sign up for their product.[1]
2) Google has the honor of receiving the largest civil penalty the Federal Trade Commission has ever imposed for overriding their user's privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser.[2] For some perspective: this fine was 0.1 percent of Larry Page's net worth, or what Google takes in over the course of about 5 hours.
3) Google search makes a regular habit of scraping other web sites and displaying ads against the content, something explicitly banned by their ToS for Adwords users.[3]
4) Google search also regularly shows upwards of 75% ads on a page. For instance, a search for "Kansas City real estate" returns you nine ads and three organic search results when viewed on a 2560 x 1440 screen[4] (15" MacBook Pro). This is explicitly against their policy, "Publishers should avoid site layouts in which the ads push content below the fold. These layouts make it hard for users to distinguish between the content and ads."[5] This also violates their add limit per page[6] laid out in their ToS.
5) This might be my favorite. If you Google "Scraper Site" they will actually scrape the explanation of the term from Wikipedia and serve up for you[7].
This what I could put together in about 20 minutes. Doing anything more than cursory research on this subject will leave with a very bad taste in your mouth about Google as a steward of the world's information. From convenient banning stories like this to lying about the data they collect in the first place and then lying about how long they keep it.
[1]http://business-ethics.com/2012/08/14/10058-is-22-5-million-...
[4]https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Diff...
[5]https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Ad_l...
[6]http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-misuses-mocality-d...
A top comment from the last thread about this story:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755386
Another comment on that thread points out that Amazon also sanctioned them:
No company is perfect. There have been a few distasteful decisions from Google, but every company has had those. And besides, Google could be far more evil than it has been. We should probably give them the benefit of the doubt unless there is some strong evidence.
This is the bar they have to clear? Pretty low standards if you ask me.
Update: We haven’t heard from Amazon, but Zlio looks to be in direct competition with aStore, a new service from Amazon. See Centernetwork’s coverage here from late last year. Zlio actually launched the same day as aStore. That still isn’t a good explanation as to why Amazon has shut them off, however.
"That is evil, Google does no evil, therefore that doesn't happen."
Edit: Two links substantiating this
News item: http://www.mgmaps.com/news.php?older=1#item174
Forum discussion: http://forum.mgmaps.com/viewtopic.php?t=1868
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
just remember this and you should be fine with your unix beard in the XXI century. :)
Sometimes overall search quality suffers, but of course the deals team is the #1 priority in the company. I honestly don't know how they get away with this from a monopoly perspective!!!
Edit:
OK, people aren't getting this. This is a joke. Google does not do this. I never worked on Google search, but those people were insanely serious about worrying about search quality and isolating themselves from other teams. The claims in this joke are also ridiculous, I thought the fact this was a joke was obvious, but I was wrong.
Sorry for the confusion. I will label all jokes in the future.
Sorry for the downvote.
Also: wow.
If anything, I'm inclined to think charitably about Google, because my contacts there are on the security team and are uniformly excellent people.
I know the feeling though; I've taken similar swings at deadpan humor and struck out, too.
i bet lots of good, honest people worked for Enron.
In reality however, the spam which was being linked by users to their sub-sites should have been hosted on a separate domain name. That was a bad choice by the company. Especially if they weren't going to actively disallow links constantly.
I strongly recommend this excellent post from Justin Kan: http://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-comp...
Consider the following: how would you value a business, if you don't know how it is structured, how it operates, and how much revenues and profits it's generating?
I can potentially see that working for some cool technology startup, or an acqui-hire, but not for an actual business with revenues (and more importantly, profits).
Those small acquisitions, they're not investments for Google, they're expenses. The $500m-$1bn+ ones, those are investments. Big difference in thinking.
I... don't know? I know at the low end, you are completely correct. If I had a nickle every time someone wanted to buy prgmr.com for the ebay value of the servers, well, I'd be able to buy another server or two.
I ended up being pretty free with my revenue numbers... and yeah, most people are just sniffing. I guess I wasn't much of a business person, so i didn't really understand (still don't, really) why those should be super secret.
But on the high end, I would assume (and again, zero experience on the high end) I would assume that if it were worth google's lawyer time to set up the deal that they would come out with a price that was, you know, significant money by my own standards.
1) Shoot for flipping and acquihire. This is where most folks are going. It probably makes the most sense for an early 20-something
2) Stay off the radar because you are uncool, using old tech, doing something stupid, the market's not big enough, or so forth. Bootstrap. Don't do a lot of PR. Don't get attention, because there are a ton of big companies full of guys who ran successful startups who are looking for cool things to work on -- if you don't look the right way, they'll just run over you and do it on their own.
The game-changers like Uber or Facebook probably start out in category 2 and then have such incredible momentum and execution intelligence that by the time they're noticed, it's too late for followers-on. That's a most tricky maneuver to pull off.
(Note: I know nothing about startups except having a few that didn't pan out, talking to friends online that have some, working in SV, and reading a lot about them. I have as much chance of telling you something useful as the psychic hotline. This is tough stuff.)
"This decision sentences us... to pay damages for publishing our opinion about Referencement on Twitter. ... This sentence means we cannot go on. "
Ultimately, they were fined 10,000 Euros (it seems) for slandering their SEO company on Twitter. But I am sure the challenge of having an open site where anyone can post anything (and modify their own templates) was the root cause. It's hard to be totally open to user's content and maintain Google's domain trust.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/social-ecommerce-site-zlio-...
Didn't they get caught a few months ago doing exactly that? I forget the company but when they got their documents back from Google they had sticky notes all over it asking engineers for workarounds to IP... or am I remember it completely wrong?
Poorly worded email, asking a lot of sensitive information, with nothing specific in guarantee, and not following-up on timeline, with non-specific proposals. Seems like a pretty good reason to avoid a proposal.
So, what happened and why did it fall through?
could have been innocent reasons, an algo shift. it happens. sometimes you win the SEO lottery, sometimes they pull the rug out.
my own experience: roughly 3-5 years ago (don't remember off-hand) I woke up one day to learn that Google had listed me as the top search result, first page, for a particular combo of terms. I forget exactly what it was but it was something like "Java Python Flash Linux game developer" or whatever. I had learned about this from an out-of-the-blue client lead who emailed me. I was shocked when he said that's how he found me. I then went around to about a dozen different computers, different types, different geo locations in my state, both auth'ed and anonymous, and sure enough I always came up as top result, first page. It was... an awesome time to be taking on contract/consulting work, let me tell you. So many more leads coming in than before. Not enough hours in the week/month to help them, had to turn down otherwise interesting gigs.
Then it came to an end. Rug pulled out. Woke up one day, rankings changed, no longer on top like that.
Lesson (one anyway): that's a huge eyeball funnel. bazillions of people doing searches. even getting a tiny slice of it means tons of eyeballs stumbling upon you. quality is important, of course, being great at what you do, having the right leads, a good fit, avail, etc. But quantity? That has a quality of its own.