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In March 2007, we signed a term sheet with Mangrove who wanted to invest in Zlio..A few days after, I met a Google Executive who decided to buy the company. Fo

In March 2007, we signed a term sheet with Mangrove who wanted to invest in Zlio..A few days after, I met a Google Executive who decided to buy the company. For the little story, Zlio, became blacklisted/sandboxed by Google 6 months after…. It killed the company… 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755386

hobolord 12y ago
I think they put majority of the blame on Google, but maybe it was because their SEO team wasn't able to get them higher on Google's pagerank? Or competition?
- jber 12y ago
  We had no SEO team before the blacklisting. We gave to all of our members/stores owners the possibility to customize their store template.
  - bsaul 12y ago
    Didn't know your tech guys were based in israel. Would that explain, now that i think about it that i see a kind of similar spirit between wix.com and zilo ? Also, i was a zilo user back in the time, and really liked it. Glad things turned out well for you !
    - jber 12y ago
      It was Zlio not Zilo (Yep, I know it was a poor name) 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.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
zakelfassi 12y ago
Reminds me of Season4's Ep3 (Two Girls One Code) of The Good Wife. Two startup founders who developed voice recognition software were negatively affected by tweaked search engine page ranking of ChumHum after refused being acquired. Coincidence?
- wickawic 12y ago
  The Good Wife takes lots of stories from real life. I'm thinking specifically of the episode when a show (like Glee) lifted a cover of a song (like Baby Got Back) from an artist (like Jonathan Coulton) who didn't technically own the copyright to the lyrics or melody.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
I don't think Google did anything intentional, but it probably doesn't matter. 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.
- jber 12y ago
  We don't think Google did something intentionally We worked a lot with them. They posted that on their Adsense blog 1 month before the blacklisting : http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/08/adsense-api-on-e-commerce-platform.html http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/08/adsense-api-on-e-commerc...
wmeredith 12y ago
Would Google use their influence to kill a competitor for the own benefit? Definitely. They have a pattern of going against their own rules, their users' interests, and even the law when they stand to gain. To say this situation is any different in the absence of hard evidence, would be naive. (Edit, OP provided the aforementioned evidence that Google did have a competitive reason to do this.) 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-dollars-a-big-enough-penalty-for-google/ http://business-ethics.com/2012/08/14/10058-is-22-5-million-... [2]http://imgur.com/RjiKmOy http://imgur.com/RjiKmOy [3]http://imgur.com/ehIAsOa http://imgur.com/ehIAsOa [4]https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Difficult_to_distinguish_ads_and_content https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Diff... [5]https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Ad_limit_per_page https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Ad_l... [6]http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-misuses-mocality-database/38789/ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-misuses-mocality-d... [7]http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tweet-185684 http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tweet-185684
gcb0 12y ago
apple is the new ibm. google is the new microsoft. and ironically, microsoft is the new apple (spining cool products that ultimately fail in the market). So it is no suprise google shoves it's weight around to shutdown (or buy, its the same) competitors. just remember this and you should be fine with your unix beard in the XXI century. :)
- birken 12y ago
  The Google search team actually has 3 weekly meetings with the deals team. The deals team keeps them apprised of potential deals they are working on, and then the search team tunes the weekly algorithm updates to either boost or penalize the various companies, whatever the deal team wants. Sometimes they are boosting on Monday, but by Friday they are penalizing. Things move fast in the deals team! 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.
  - pepon 12y ago
    That is a pretty strong accusation. What is your source?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - tptacek 12y ago
    I downvoted this comment, but that was dumb of me; I should have clicked through to the user profile. If you're going to write something like this and sign your name to it, you should get some of the benefit of the doubt. Which is what you did. Sorry for the downvote. Also: wow.
Mandatum 12y ago
What's interesting is this is a perfect case of having a single monopoly on search is so damning to businesses. This company essentially depended on being indexed by Google - once they were struck off, their fate which was at the hands of Google is sealed. 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.
dmak 12y ago
Responding to the spamming bit: I think this should be taken lightly. I mean, ANYONE could post up those links.

hobolord 12y ago

I think they put majority of the blame on Google, but maybe it was because their SEO team wasn't able to get them higher on Google's pagerank? Or competition?

jber 12y ago
We had no SEO team before the blacklisting. We gave to all of our members/stores owners the possibility to customize their store template.
- bsaul 12y ago
  Didn't know your tech guys were based in israel. Would that explain, now that i think about it that i see a kind of similar spirit between wix.com and zilo ? Also, i was a zilo user back in the time, and really liked it. Glad things turned out well for you !
  - jber 12y ago
    It was Zlio not Zilo (Yep, I know it was a poor name) 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.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]

zakelfassi 12y ago

Reminds me of Season4's Ep3 (Two Girls One Code) of The Good Wife. Two startup founders who developed voice recognition software were negatively affected by tweaked search engine page ranking of ChumHum after refused being acquired. Coincidence?

wickawic 12y ago
The Good Wife takes lots of stories from real life. I'm thinking specifically of the episode when a show (like Glee) lifted a cover of a song (like Baby Got Back) from an artist (like Jonathan Coulton) who didn't technically own the copyright to the lyrics or melody.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

I don't think Google did anything intentional, but it probably doesn't matter. 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.

jber 12y ago
We don't think Google did something intentionally We worked a lot with them. They posted that on their Adsense blog 1 month before the blacklisting : http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/08/adsense-api-on-e-commerce-platform.html http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/08/adsense-api-on-e-commerc...

wmeredith 12y ago

Would Google use their influence to kill a competitor for the own benefit? Definitely. They have a pattern of going against their own rules, their users' interests, and even the law when they stand to gain. To say this situation is any different in the absence of hard evidence, would be naive. (Edit, OP provided the aforementioned evidence that Google did have a competitive reason to do this.) 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-dollars-a-big-enough-penalty-for-google/ http://business-ethics.com/2012/08/14/10058-is-22-5-million-... [2]http://imgur.com/RjiKmOy http://imgur.com/RjiKmOy [3]http://imgur.com/ehIAsOa http://imgur.com/ehIAsOa [4]https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Difficult_to_distinguish_ads_and_content https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Diff... [5]https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Ad_limit_per_page https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Ad_l... [6]http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-misuses-mocality-database/38789/ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-misuses-mocality-d... [7]http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tweet-185684 http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tweet-185684

gcb0 12y ago

apple is the new ibm. google is the new microsoft. and ironically, microsoft is the new apple (spining cool products that ultimately fail in the market). So it is no suprise google shoves it's weight around to shutdown (or buy, its the same) competitors. just remember this and you should be fine with your unix beard in the XXI century. :)

birken 12y ago
The Google search team actually has 3 weekly meetings with the deals team. The deals team keeps them apprised of potential deals they are working on, and then the search team tunes the weekly algorithm updates to either boost or penalize the various companies, whatever the deal team wants. Sometimes they are boosting on Monday, but by Friday they are penalizing. Things move fast in the deals team! 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.
- pepon 12y ago
  That is a pretty strong accusation. What is your source?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- tptacek 12y ago
  I downvoted this comment, but that was dumb of me; I should have clicked through to the user profile. If you're going to write something like this and sign your name to it, you should get some of the benefit of the doubt. Which is what you did. Sorry for the downvote. Also: wow.

Mandatum 12y ago

What's interesting is this is a perfect case of having a single monopoly on search is so damning to businesses. This company essentially depended on being indexed by Google - once they were struck off, their fate which was at the hands of Google is sealed. 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.

dmak 12y ago

Responding to the spamming bit: I think this should be taken lightly. I mean, ANYONE could post up those links.