Deep thoughts by bigtime lawyers...

Nearly everyone in the technology sector, especially those focused on the Internet, have een talking about the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act. We’re not here to debate the finer points of combatting intellectual property theft on the internet — the “SOPA Blackout” has done a fine one-sided job of that. (If you’re interested in a very in-depth look at the whole saga, try Forbes’s information dump.) This “Blackout” has all the right components of a perfect case study of SEO, technical site architecture, viral marketing, and the nature of the internet.

As a preface, President Obama has basically said SOPA in its current form is a no-go. Similarly, by 8:30am, SOPA was losing supporters in the Senate. Whether by virtue of the Internet’s rage or by simple practicality and a realization that the legislature was in over its collective head, SOPA and PIPA seem to be sidelined. Similar bills are waiting in the wings, but will likely not see the light of day until months later.

Full Blackout

Imagine a World Without Wikipedia

Two sites led the initial charge for the Blackout, and they did it almost completely. Reddit and Wikipedia have nearly completely blacked out their sites, both seemingly using JavaScript. Wikipedia has done this by hiding all the content on the page, then adding a content block using jQuery. As soon as this happened, some found a way to hack around it using a browser console, but most users will lose access to one the most-trafficked pure information sites on the Internet. Wikipedia’s method likely has no SEO impact, but is effective at getting the user to do what the site wants — ponder life without a user-generated information source like Wikipedia, and use their already-extant legislator search to find the right person to bug about the issue.

What if I want a news link?

Reddit, on the other hand, is serving a totally different page for all links to the site. Not only is it providing information and calls to action to call a representative or sign a petition, but it also provides a list of compatriots who have also “gone black.” But both of these full blackouts highlight a major problem for a business site — what if someone is looking for your site? Looking for your content? Looking to buy something from you?

Man, I hope they meant to do that...

One of Reddit’s brothers-in-arms is the game Minecraft, which is a for-pay game that’s been a bit of a media darling for its bizarre gameplay. But today, if you’re trying to find out about the game, all you can find from the site itself is that they’ve shut down the site in protest of SOPA. And that’s the gamble with a full takedown of your site — are your users aligned with you enough to understand or even support a totally unusable site? Is Wikipedia going to lose share to About.com or another mirror of the encyclopedia? Will Reddit lose share to i-am-bored.com?

The answer is, not really. Barring some shocking numbers come tomorrow, even any lost traffic today will be forgotten tomorrow. In addition, the kind of domain-level link-love and social clout that will be showered upon these sites may override any short-term losses. Essentially, we won’t forget that Wikipedia still has solid information about every Pokemon, that Reddit is the nouveau-garde of social sharing, or that minecraft.com is probably a trusted source for information about the game.

Blackouts for Smaller Sites?

But for personal sites, small businesses, and other smaller sites without the kind of instant recognition, the loss of a sale might be too much. While we’ve talked about the general level of knowledge of website owners, nowhere is it more evident than when this kind of blackout goes bad. WordPress has been shilling its “SOPAstrike” plugin, to be used by website owners to serve an SEO-friendly “503 Service Unavailable” error and redirect to yet another page to contact someone in charge. It’ll even bring your site back whenever it’s done!

Here’s the code for the suggested plugin:

function sopastrike()
{
	if(!is_admin())
	{
		if(time() > 1326862801 && time() < 1326934800)
		{
			header("HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable");
			header("Location: http://sopastrike.com/strike");

			exit;
		}
	}
}
function phone_home()
{
	$url = get_bloginfo('siteurl');
	$name = get_bloginfo('name');

	$context = stream_context_create(array(
	  'http' => array(
	      'timeout' => 1
	      )
	  )
	);
	$content =
	file_get_contents('http://extrafuture.com/code/sopastrike/track.php?url='
	.urlencode($url).'&name='.urlencode($name), false,  $context);
}

Notice that phone_home()? The plugin description does mention that it will add your url and name to a petition automatically, but with all the vitriol and pushing, who has time to read all of 15 sentences? In addition, you’re trusting this author to not say, publish your link to a bunch of “bad neighborhoods” as SEOmoz likes to call them. It’s a security hole, even if it’s one with someone you think you can trust. Can your business handle that? Barring technical issues, will your business be able to lose that traffic and still make your daily sales? Certainly one bad day even if you have no sales shouldn’t wreck your profitability, but will one day of actually being down and then a few more days until your site has been crawled again? What if you forget something and are still serving the wrong kind of page?

Man, and I liked that game...

If you’re not going to use the recommendation and use something like Wikipedia’s javascript content, a small business oftentimes doesn’t have enough resources to consider the SEO implications of what it has done. The team that is making the game Overgrowth didn’t. This is a snippet from their site, a first-page result for the term [sopa successors]. While their splash sure is pretty, do they want such unrelated search traffic? When will their site be crawled again before Google thinks the home page is highly related to SOPA?

And what about the plugin they used? All programmers are not SEO whizzes. While it’s easy to slap your forehead on such a boneheaded move, you can’t assume that even a popular plugin will be the right way to create your protest. Again, the simple solution for small businesses is not always the safest for their search rankings.

Porn and Other Easy Fixes

Of course, blocking out your site or even worrying about if your content is being crawled is not on your radar if you simply change your images a little. Matt Cutts, Twitpic, Google, and some of your Facebook and Twitter friends have used this method to show that they do not support the bill. This easy change usually has little SEO effect, but you could get some interested search if you use image alt tags intelligently.

Porn Companies Care!

But it’s not just the highbrow ivory-towered linkerati who are protesting SOPA. Porn companies are doing it harder. One of the industries most impacted by SOPA could be adult entertainment. Many sites are user-generated, falling under the same licensing and piracy issues that YouTube would have. These companies have largely installed banners or JavaScript “click to see your content” splash pages.

Viral Call to Action

Moving from porn to an almost-related subject, the virality of the SOPA blackout has provided a killer case for organic lead generation. A lobbyist group like the Electronic Frontier Foundation can easily get a list of supporters and possible wallets to back their efforts, simply by being the recipient of a large amount of blacked-out links.

What a Gorgeous Landing Page. What do you think they want you to do?

This page is a beautiful example of how to get leads. The opt-in for the newsletter makes the user feel like it’s solely to make a stand, sign a petition, and publicly project your feelings. But even if a user doesn’t click that box, demographics, cross-referencing with social networks for deeper information, and simple numbers of responses allows the EFF to better target its marketing efforts online. The EFF could also (but isn’t, in line with their ideals) grab referrer data or other tracking information to further hone their form submissions.

Finally, these form submissions would never have happened without truly viral support. Random people are linking to the EFF, because they believe in the cause that EFF is championing. They touched a true part in many internet denizens’ hearts, and have reaped the benefits. This kind of authentic sharing is at the key of this blackout — even as most sites have maintained some kind of functionality to their content. It’s not about the action here, but the message, and as sites from as many industries as can be get behind the message, maybe we’ll see the lasting search and marketing effects of the action as the week plays out.

SOPA Blackout Roundup

More Bang for Your Buck: Maximize New Links on Old Pages – Whiteboard Friday — SEOmoz

SEOmoz’s internet-famous Whiteboard Friday series explains the best practices for making the most of links from old pages. Working from an SEOWizz study, Cyrus Shepard walks you through 4 solutions to make sure Google passes all the power from an old page to your new link. The key takeaway? Make sure the old page is significantly updated and Google crawls the page again by using “bank shot” links.

Building Links & Driving Traffic with How To Posts — Wolf Howl

How-to’s are evergreen content that will provide consistent traffic to your site. SEO wise-man Michael Gray provides a slough of opportunities to build How-to content, taking into account changing and unchanging content. Using the ideas from the Whiteboard Friday, you can easily build content on your site and grow your clout in the field by being a ever-present resource for users.

How to Make Your Shopping Cart Suck Less — The Oatmeal

In the spirit of How-To, viral cartoonist the Oatmeal shows us simple things to make the Checkout process (and forms in general) seamless from a user’s perspective. From consistent layout to duplicate information to increasingly-creative-expletive-inducing errors like session timouts, it’s a perfect way to ensure you have the basic shapes of the letters right, even if your i aren’t all dotted.

7 Social Media & SEO Tactics Businesses Will Adopt in 2012 — Search Engine Watch

Bob Tripathi rounds up 7 new frontiers in Social Media. Mining sentiment, focusing on profits, and the rise of Google+ are just the beginning of the gifts in the new year. SoLoMo will be driving SEO in the future — will your brand be able to keep up?

Google using Twitter connections for recommendations in SERPS — Media Chimps

After the unveiling of “Search Plus Your World,” Google came under a deluge of complaints from other sites saying that their content was being buried under Google+. But Mark Proctor has seen Google make the connection between connected Twitter accounts associated with even unconnected Google+ accounts. A last-minute change to assuage fears of anti-competitive actions or something Twitter missed in their angst?

Does your website utilize images to catch your audience’s eye and promote user interaction? You may not be getting as much out of them as you can. Graphics add spice and break up potentially dull straight-text content, but are also a great venue for promoting your brand and drawing in surfers using image-specific searches. Here, TopRank shows you a variety of different ways to make sure all your image optimization bases are covered.

How Siri Makes Computers (and Coders) More Human — Scientific American

While this piece isn’t specifically sales-focused, it provides a fascinating look at the “humanization” of our interaction with the web — specifically Siri, the new iPhone’s AI assistant. Widely covered as the “future of search,” Siri dynamically interacts with the user to give them the information they need — no matter in what type of language the request is couched in. Here, Scientific American’s David Pogue takes a gander at what this means for human/computer interaction.

How to Build an Engaged Audience with Content Marketing — CopyBlogger

We’ve covered the importance of having a quality blog for your website, but how do you go about making sure your stellar copy and penetrating insights are seen by a consistent and attentive audience? If you’re starting from scratch, taking advice from the 30 social media pundits, bloggers, entrepreneurs and authors interviewed by CopyBlogger for this informative article may be a wise choice.

Creating a Simple Yet Powerful Social Media Marketing Plan — ProNet

Getting an audience for your blog is vital, and gaining followers and fans on your chosen social media networks is related and just as important. This article offers straightforward advice to any first-timer planning to launch and effective and eyeball-gathering media campaign that’s sure to set you apart from the rest.

Google Launches US Election Hub Website — Search Engine Land

Just in time for the presidential elections, Google has introduced their very own political hub to keep track of the 2012 race. While on the surface it may just appear to be a news aggregator, there are many interesting options for localization and trend-tracking as well. Search Engine Land has the details!

AND A BONUS! Our very own Influencer and prolific SI blogger Doug Thomas treated us to another Lunch & Learn today, this time focused on microformats and what they can do for your information organization. Click here to see the slideshow with examples and an overview!

You may recall that we were mulling over the whole Netflix situation only a few weeks ago, which has seemed to be getting more ridiculous ever since the company announced pricing changes in July that made users choke on their dinners. Twice the price for what they were getting before? Streaming-only services? People were just starting to recover, but Netflix had clearly spent a lot of time sitting alone in the dark listening to sad music; they knew they hadn’t pleased their audience. And so they decided to try to make it better (which as, many men can attest to, never works).

I guess the Qwikster debacle was more than they could handle, what with people getting more upset than ever (not to mention the stoner squatting on the Qwikster Twitter account and all that jazz). Netflix has updated their blog yet again and emailed all their users to let us know that Qwikster is not going forward after all, which looks about as professional as taking off your shirt at an office party. There was also no word about the aforementioned video game rental plan that Qwikster was going to include, so I suppose we can assume that has been scrapped as well. Oh, the hoopla.

What does this mean for Netflix now? Well, their stock has suffered dramatically since the original price change announcement. As of today their shares are still down 4.4%, which means this whole Qwikster cancellation thing has not eased anyone’s mind yet. Maybe Netflix didn’t go ahead with the crazy plan, but they announced the crazy plan and then reneged on it, which kind of makes them look even more nutty and unstable even if it was the right thing to do. It’s no surprise that investors don’t feel comfortable. It is commendable that Netflix has paid attention to the social media buzz surrounding the unpopular decision and realized that they’ve made a dumb move, but it also signifies that they aren’t thinking through major decisions enough — which is not a great sign for a company their size.

What do you think — are you relieved there will be no Qwikster, or are you disappointed in the parent company for caving to the negative social media hubbub?

It’s safe to say that Netflix pissed off a lot of people when they announced major changes to their pricing structure this past July. The new setup went something like this: $7.99 a month for unlimited streaming and $7.99 a month for one DVD out at a time. However, if subscribers didn’t actively go in and select a new plan, they would be automatically subscribed to both. The price increase, which was 60% higher than the previous prices, did not go over well. Netflix stocks plummeted, and the company found themselves with several million less subscribers than they bargained for, not to mention the massive internet backlash that followed.

What to do? Well, desperate times call for desperate measures, and any good business owner knows it. In a major move, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings sent an email to every Netflix subscriber (which is also now posted on their blog) announcing that Netflix would separate into two businesses: One called Qwikster, which would handle physical DVDs and will also add video games, and Netflix would remain as an all-streaming service. But here’s the catch — If you want to use both, you need a separate account at both websites. Inconvenient? Just a bit.

However, there are some advantages to the situation, as each business will have its own dedicated team, and Hastings promises that improvements for each service are on the drawing board. I’m sure that many users appreciate a forthcoming apology from a business of this size, and perhaps people will find this system works better for them. What is notable is that so much of the results of Netflix’s downfall in the eyes of the public was geared by social media: Within minutes of the price change announcements, people were in an uproar all over Facebook and Twitter, swearing they would drop their Netflix accounts and move to Hulu. Those people told their friends, and so on and so forth, and the chain continued. Whether businesses like it or not, they know that social media is powerful enough to literally cause a mass exodus, so they must consider carefully when it comes to making major decisions such as this.

Speaking of Twitter, you may want to hold off on going to follow the @qwikster Twitter account for now, should you be interested to do so. Why? Well, apparently it’s being squatted on by a guy who is not exactly the epitome of class. He does have over 11,000 followers, however, who are probably getting just the show they bargained for. And he’s enjoying the attention, because he won’t give up the account. Hopefully Quikster has a gameplan to fix that messy little issue….

Shutting down the ability for these sites to advertise online...

As expected from page 21 of the May 10 quarterly report to the SEC, Google will pay for a Department of Justice investigation into the use of American ad space for illegal Canadian pharmaceuticals. Finding that from 2003 to 2009, Google “both allowed and helped” Canadian pharmacies that tried to sell to US patients, this DOJ settlement avoids criminal prosecution. It’s also one of the largest forfeitures in US history, according to Rhode Island U.S. Attorney Peter F. Neronha. Crimaldi argues that Google may see long-term reputation damage from the case, which butts heads with the mantra of “Don’t be Evil.”

But is this backlash really going on? Google’s stock price was up $4.47 (.86%) on the day, despite Crimaldi’s piece coming out at 8am yesterday. Crimaldi predicted this by mentioning its miniscule amount compared to Google’s cash on hand; but not only this, the money has been paid for already. Google already mentioned it almost a year ago. The fallout for this may have already rippled the zeitgeist — May 10 began a 6-day slump, though not the nadir of a 3-month losing streak starting in April. Making comparisons even harder is the 5-day selloff that was likely a direct commentary on Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the company’s shares to “Sell.” S&P rated the stock a “Hold” yesterday, basically saying “the price is right.” Similarly, Robert W. Baird & Co. sees verticals like YouTube as undervalued, and sees the stock outperforming the market, even growing to $650 a share.

Three salient points arise from this story. First, there is a lot of trust in Google. The business world sees one of the main thrusts of European antitrust investigation as a boon to the company: the vertical integration Google has enacted. Secondly, Google isn’t the Dad and Dad store it was, even as recently as last decade. Google’s revenue has exploded by 33% over the past fiscal year, in no small part due to the Adsense/Admeld deal. Finally, Google has often toed the line of what is or isn’t legal — for a less objectionable example, look at Google’s reticence to Chinese censorship laws.

Peter F. Neronha, sending "a clear message to... Google and to others that contribute to America's pill problem that they will be held to account."

Most importantly is that this has already been planned for and dealt with. The submitted Form 10-Q says:

In May 2011, in connection with a potential resolution of an investigation by the United States Department of Justice into the use of Google advertising by certain advertisers, we accrued $500 million for the three month period ended March 31, 2011. Although we cannot predict the ultimate outcome of this matter, we believe it will not have a material adverse effect on our business, consolidated financial position, results of operations, or cash flows.”

Google still allows American pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies to advertise on Adwords and Adsense, though under much stricter rules. Clearly, neither Google nor its handlers are concerned about this, and neither should anyone with a vested interest in the company.

“This is great news for not only Will Scott and his team at Search Influence but for the entire Greater New Orleans region,” said Michael Hecht, President and CEO of GNO, Inc. “This recognition is very well deserved and serves as further proof that our region is fostering innovation in the form of entrepreneurship and new businesses.”

Search Influence, which provides its customers with full-service internet and social media marketing, currently has 32 full-time employees and 40 contractors that serve over 1,000 locally focused businesses across the United States and abroad, both directly and as an outsourcing provider to major national companies. With three-year sales growth of 825%, the company plans to expand up to a total of 50 full-time and 50 contract employees by the end of 2012. Search Influence is currently listing open positions on WorkNOLA.com.

“We’re really validated to have made it on the Inc. 500,” said Will Scott, Co-Founder and CEO of Search Influence. “Our customers and our team have really been the engine of our success, and we’re glad to have the Inc. 500 award as a testament to that work. We’re happy to be among the companies helping New Orleans and Louisiana through new jobs, revenues, and our evangelism.”

Search Influence joins Intuit, Jamba Juice, Microsoft, Oracle, Vizio, Zappos, Zipcar, and many other globally known companies that have gained early exposure as members of the Inc. 500. The 2011 Inc. 500, unveiled in the September issue of Inc., represents a group of companies smaller but much faster-growing than last year’s list.

Aggregate revenue for the 2011 Inc. 500 is $10.5 billion, with a median three-year growth of 1,275%. The companies on this year’s list employ more than 46,000 people and have generated over 35,000 jobs in the past three years.

In addition to Search Influence’s inclusion on the Inc. 500, several other businesses from Greater New Orleans were included on the 2011 Inc. 5000. The following companies based in Southeast Louisiana are featured on this year’s Inc. 5000:

• Search Influence, New Orleans, #418
• Ampirical Solutions, Covington, #578
• Modern American Recycling Services, Mandeville, #1185
• NewBath, New Orleans, #1219
• AAC Enterprises, Metairie, #1245
• Bottom Line Equipment, St. Rose, #1313
• Cabildo Holdings, New Orleans, #1329
• Geocent, Metairie, #1960
• The Olinger Group, New Orleans, #2398
• Netchex, Mandeville, #2649
• Barrister Global Services Network, Hammond, #2771
• Woodward Design+Build, New Orleans, #2777
• PMOLink, Mandeville, #3236
• Novaces, New Orleans, #3572
• Keating Magee Marketing Communications, New Orleans, #3624
• The Marketing Center, New Orleans, #3754
• The Velez Corporation, New Orleans, #3866
• Adams & Reese, New Orleans, #4598

Together, these 18 companies employ a total of 1,614 people and have combined revenue of $589.2 million. Complete results, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, are available at Inc.com/500.

For more information on Search Influence, please visit www.searchinfluence.com.

Originally published by GNO Inc.

"I'll take the case!"

Making good on a somewhat threatening letter from the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights two weeks earlier, on June 23, the FTC continued their impression of Harvey Birdman. Issuing a subpoena “relating to a review… of Google’s business practices, including search and advertising,” the FTC has opened an investigation to “address fundamental questions of business operations.” These questions, though immediately unclear to Google (if their admission and response on their blog isn’t just rhetoric), have been speculated on rather endlessly by pundits.

Starting from their blog, Google lists a few ways that they believe they put the user, i.e. their consumer in economic terms, first in their decisions. Search neutrality, vertical integration of search, the relationships involving paid search, clarity of function and policy, and consumer choice and freedom of movement, are all core facets upon which Google prides itself. Similarly, SEO dominatrix Matt Cutts discussed with Bloomberg news about the case, but managed to deflect most of the more interesting questions.

On first glance, this investigation seems to parallel the Microsoft case that crippled the company’s ability to innovate on its OS, but not its market share or company size. The Findings of Fact from that case, which were not overturned in the successful appeal, offer insight into the kinds of inquiry Google will endure. However, it’s quickly becoming clear that substantive differences may doom the FTC’s case.

Much of the argument for monopoly power in the Microsoft case stems from an inability for consumers to effectively and seamlessly switch from platform to platform. If you have a PC, you’ll either have to run Windows or put in serious effort to run your computer like Windows. But in Google’s case, they are more like the open-source alternatives in that there is a high level of customizability and a large number of competitors that are easy to switch to. Google and Microsoft both benefit from the positive feedback loop (or arguably vicious cycle, if you’re a competitor) caused by being the dominant firm in the industry. Consumers and business partners (read: surfers and webmasters) use and develop for Google first and primarily, as it is the best-known way of finding things on the Internet.

Google’s close-to-first-mover advantage is, of course a major effect on competitiveness of the industry, outstripping Yahoo and, so far, with more panache than Bing. Furthermore, Google’s dominance isn’t just in search. Their maps and directions have all but relegated Mapquest to vintage sites; YouTube is clearly the most-used video site on the web; the image search, though lacking some of the features of TinEye, certainly is used more; Google Docs is infinitely more well-known than any of its competitors, including offerings from Microsoft Office and Adobe; and their forays into social platforms, though rather unsuccessful, may have finally found its niche, cutting into Facebook shares per article across the top 100 tech sites. Google might even suffer the same fear of pre-installation, as three of four major browsers, one of which is owned by the company, search on Google by default.

Sure, Google has the majority of search share, between 60% and 70%. But do the influences of Facebook’s social search, Twitter’s massive linksharing search, the vertical search engines, and the distinctive qualities that truly separate Google’s broad search competitors from the Big Panda really have no effect on the breadth of choices the consumer has to find content on the web? Even more so, many of the features of Docs are better implemented outside of a browser. And ever-lurking behind that success is the fact that technology, and especially non-physical products and services, have a habit of being fleeting or changing focus rapidly — case in point: Mahalo. Google isn’t invulnerable — their social networks so far have been rife with deep enough privacy issues to be all but shuttered by a class-action settlement.

Even further complicating the antitrust case is the increasingly incestuous relationship between Google and the US government. “Only” $40 million (.13%) of Google’s revenue comes from government contracts, but it’s extraordinarily clear that even having government contracts gives a major foothold in emerging markets, amplifying the first-mover advantage already in place. These contracts range from simple things like email (using Google’s Apps for Government) and Analytics to more bizarre agreements involving Google Earth for the Pentagon, FBI, and DEA and aircraft parking deals with NASA. Even more sticky is the enormous amount of lobbying Google has done over the past 5 years, increasing their budget from $800,000 in 2006 to over $5.1 million in 2010. Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, is a close friend of President Obama, and the company came in 5th for campaign donations to his campaign.

But the obvious monopoly power wasn’t even the focus of the Microsoft trial — it was, in fact, a bait-and-switch on the general public to garner support for much more complex antitrust issues. The trial was to “address fundamental questions of business operations” concerning how it licensed the APIs differently to different companies to limit competition. While on the one hand Google has relentlessly supported open source coding, helping create a transparent and easy-to-enter market, they are also constantly involved in boxing out competitors, though this doesn’t minimize that coalitions have gathered to do the same to Big Panda too.

A slough of allegations regarding Google’s advertisement business have cropped up in the wake of the announcement of the investigation. Two arguments are at the center of the debate: that Google unfairly affects the Adwords bidding process in favor of Google-owned entities, and that Google unfairly affects the organic rankings in favor of high-revenue Adsense partners. Both of these arguments fly in the face of official Google policy.

Those claims must be on the radar of FTC officials, but judges and prosecutors will almost certainly either be too unfamiliar with the system to be able to parse out the technical details in place, or be baffled by the ubiquity of Google ads across the internet and lose the forest for the trees — such relatively outlandish accusations drive attention away from more prescient issues in the advertising system, such as uneven application of standards for content. These arguments break down even further on investigation, since social sharing likely drives more traffic to larger content farms, such as perennial slacker favorite and Demand Media flagship Cracked, which enjoys a vibrant social share rate. It would be extremely surprising if either of these accusations turn out to be true; however, if they are, Google will have to answer for significantly more than anyone expected.

The other side of the allegation coin is significantly less conspiracy-theory. The massive vertical integration Google has committed since moving away from simply being a text search engine, starting with Images and moving towards Maps and GIS systems, Books, shopping, and travel links. Such rapid expansion into every money-making part of the web leads some to ask “How many industries is Google allowed to index under search and deprive the creators of an ability to monetize it?”

That would be a valid question if two factors weren’t in play. First, modern economic theory finds vertical integration to be more economically efficient and better for consumers — the real victims of noncompetitive markets for antitrust theory, as opposed to the monopoly’s competitors. But this isn’t enough — if the only portal to websites were search engines, it would be a travesty to allow search engines to keep eating up website business models and including them as “search.” But why would a company solely rely on a third party to provide traffic? Certainly the reason why one would go to Kayak or Expedia is because of more traditional marketing they’ve done to draw attention to their site. Where the internet is concerned, many e-businesses seem to forget that their branding isn’t their top-ranking keyword — it’s actually having a business that people will want to use and recommend to their friends.

Recommendations are not only through social media sites, either. +1 and Facebook and Twitter and whatever else is around the bend isn’t the only kind of endorsement e-business can enjoy — whatever happened to meatspace? Yelp, Foundem, and Kayak have all registered complaints against Google, saying that the vertical search integration has damaged their businesses irreparably. The short answer is “get over it;” the longer one involves some stern words to the companies’ marketing departments.

But Google+ is different, and may be taken as a gigantic pyrotechnic middle finger to the FTC. Facebook and Google do compete, but the lines have always been in different business models, even as Facebook includes more and more Internet searching into their platform. Google+ is the first real competitor to Facebook, as Orkut was pre-existing and woefully underpopulated in the US and Buzz was more of a Twitter competitor. This kind of vertical integration and attempt to eat up more of people’s time on the web is exactly the wrong kind of publicity Google needs, even as it avoids the problems of stagnation that Microsoft had when it was under investigation. It’s hard to believe the competition-themed sales pitch Google cooked up after receiving the FTC notification, when even the Economist sees Google+ as a direct competitor to FB in order to return Google to its position as the “main conduit via which people access the web.”

Regardless of the intent or timing of Google+, the expansion and Internet buzz around the new service shows the power of the already-abandoned mantra “Don’t be evil.” The Economist likened the “addictiveness” of Google to chocolate instead of cigarettes; Internet analyst Greg Sterling mentions Google’s “capacity to evoke a certain kind of enthusiasm when it tries to do something that is difficult;” and everyone’s Facebook feed seems to have one friend who’s closing up shop and scooting over to feed El-Goog because they somehow trust Singhal, Schmidt, and Cutts over Zuckerberg.

And that consumer trust, despite the wails of webmasters of various types and complaints of those who work closely with Google, might be the deciding factor in this case. In general, we choose to search, share, and produce with Google, despite the fact that we might be more than gently directed recursively back to other Google properties. While this FTC investigation could spell the end of Google dominance, the tipping point is a filing of a complaint, not the start of the review, and even former FTC official David Balto assumes that there is likely no explicit wrongdoing. This FTC case, however, may give Bing its golden ticket to significantly differentiate itself from Google and become a more significant competitor.

The AP reported a 1.4% drop in stock value immediately following the FTC announcement, but the stock has since recovered.

For edification, here are the Bing and Google organic results pages for a variety of broad Google Services.