Making Google personal

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Google, you've lost my vote!
From a mega-cool company with hip products, Google turned into a mega employer with strict policies and regulations.

Listen to this (true) story about www.taadaam.com and decide for yourself what you think about Google:

January 2008 – "Birth of cool"

I came across a website with Google AdSense for Search. In short, these are websites that contain a search-box powered by Google (anyone can do it). The point is that once someone visits the website and makes a search with this search-box, the site owner and Google make money from visitors clicking on Google advertisements.

Only problem is – these sites often look pretty lame. A few examples:

Pretty ugly, hey? And what's worse – who would ever want to set that as home-page?

So this got me and friend Weber thinking: why would anyone want to have some commercial brand show-up in front of their face at all? Wouldn't it be neat if you could see your own name up there? And not just your own name – but in Google style.

So, being a couple of web techies (remember, Sergei and Larry?) we wrote this site taadaam.com and let the fun begin

There. Clean, simple, and Google style.

Our mission was to make Taadaam a trend, something for people like so much – they would willingly pass to their friends, aka "Viral Marketing".

We chipped in, bought a hosting plan at 20 bucks a month and thought we could cover it by adding Google AdSense.

Now, my friend and I are working people, and we had no intension on spending time or money on this small site's promotion. We based it all word-to-mouth distribution and had a good feeling about it.

March 2008: The big "G" at work

Believe it or not, but after just 2 months, 32,703 different people from 93 countries visited Taadaam, many of them kept Taadaam as their homepage.

Did I mention we didn't spend a dime on marketing?

So what did we earn? About $52 from AdSense advertisement but more importantly – enormous satisfaction!

We had people from Australia, Peru, Nigeria, UK, China, even Iran - all hooked on our little site. Heartwarming.

H o w e v e r, at some point Google's radar picked up on our so called "scam". An email template was sent to us saying:

you're violating our logo… not complying with our policy… we will terminate your AdSense account

Well, I read their policy and it's hard to determine from there what Google property is. In any event, we definitely didn't want to steal their font and their colors. We put a disclaimer at the bottom of the site saying that Google has full rights on their properties.

At the same time our result page (when someone searched from Taadaam) turned into this:

Not so heartwarming anymore…

So, heart-shattered, I wrote an email to Google saying:

1. We come in peace

2. We respect Google and the fact that people like putting their name in a Google style logo only shows the admiration scale towards this great company

3. Show us the right way, how can we change Taadaam to be legit?

Google responded with the same exact template as before - no human touch whatsoever:

you're violating our logo… not complying with our policy… we will terminate your AdSense account

Guys, is there anyone home? Are you people at Googleplex looking down little people's alley?

I've heard of Google acting like monster company but couldn't believe it until now. The fact most of its current staff are newbies (I heard that over 60% of Google employees were

recruited in 2007!) strengthens this thought. Perhaps Google is a place where few geniuses run the show and the rest are but clerks with policy papers in their hands.

I don't know if it's Obama Hillary or McCain for you but if you ask me – Google has lost my vote.

Hope you enjoy our website

- The Taadaam team

+ P.S. After Google put the "Forbidden" page in our result page, we switched from the adsense program back to a standard Google result page. As I mentioned before - we're not there for the money, we are there for you guys :-)

Labels: ban, colors, font, forbidden, freedom, google, Taadaam

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Labels: google, live, Taadaam