The biggest companies get too unwieldy to work right, in my experience. Just look at Facebook, who never bothered to take protective actions it was supposed to, and now it’s so big it is a monumental task to even begin. Godaddy, the biggest domain registrar in the world, doesn’t know what all its parts are doing, so it’s messing up. Its website sends simultaneous but conflicting emails with instructions that are wrong, and the people on the phone tell you as much, saying to ignore this or that. And it is the worst place to sell a domain name.

It had a good reputation in the past, partly because of their customer service; you can always get someone on the phone and they are thoughtful and courteous. (I am forced to call a lot, and only once was spoken to snippily.) But the people on the phone have difficulty handling the problems stuck in their system.

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It is a shame that the kinds of things I have had to work on over the years are so… dull. Really, everlastingly boring! Domain names, well, the history of the internet is involved and that part appeals to me at least. A decade or so ago, it was poker stuff I had to work on — articles & editing. And if you have no interest in cards or gambling, this too is deadly dull. I don’t know how people can spend their lives at it. Prior to that, I think I spent a lot of time writing phrases, blurbs, descriptions, and even full articles that were not intended to be read by human beings, but by search engines. Or at least it didn’t matter if humans read them or not. That’s how a lot of webmasters worked back then, with no regard to what real people wanted or needed online; we did what Google and MSN/Bing and Dogpile and AltaVista and Alexa(.net) found necessary, because those search engines determined the fate of your website. And their methods were still not very good for people surfing online.

I remember webmasters who tried to rank high on Google by tricks. There was someone whose home page was a big white blank with just one word on it. He was ranked very high in the results on Google for that word, because that keyword represented 100% of the text on his home page. And later, when Google made sure people couldn’t game the system by doing that, webmasters would put invisible text on the page to affect their search rankings one way or another.

Soon invisible text would cause Google to downgrade you, too. But the race to make Google read your website and rank it highly by using tricks went on and on for years. These days it’s simply called “optimizing” and it is expected. Because Google naturally doesn’t tell you what specific criteria it uses to rank websites, search engine optimization is partly your own theory.

There’s been a big change in Google’s ways for the surfer too. Now, when you search for a phrase, you may notice that the results — which show in bold the words you searched — are just as likely to be reversed, split up, etc. For example, if you searched for “heart rock” your first results might include “rock heart” listings, or “heart of rock” or “rock down in the heart” — because Google considers many of these equivalent now.

And now I will stop.