Before I even start, I want to say this is high on the speculation meter. A single post at WebmasterWorld said he heard via an investor, Bill Burnham, that Google is changing their policies for traffic partners. The specific policy they are changing, as said in the thread, is that Google is considering changing their policies to prevent search traffic partners from changing users' home page & default search settings.
That means, if you are a partner with Google, such as Dell, and you want to change the users' home page or default search settings when they install something (I guess, it is not clear) then Google will consider this a violation of their new policy?
Let me quote the whole post:
I read an interesting report by Google watcher Bill Burnham this morning, discussing a publicly-traded firm called Incredimail who derives virtually all their ~$27M in annual revenues from Google. Incredimail offers free email add-ons (emoticons, backgrounds, animations, 3D effects, etc) to the consumer, and makes its money by resetting users' home page and default search to Google.What's news is that Incredimail said today that they're aware Google is considering changing their policies to prevent search traffic partners from changing users' home page & default search settings. Despite strong revenues, Incredimail's stock dropped 15% today on this disclosure.
Do you think this is true? Clearly this had an impact on one of their partner's stock. But what is really going on here?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
