
The Email I Received from Google in 2007 When They Wanted to Buy Zilo (2012) - zakelfassi
http://www.berrebi.org/2012/11/07/the-email-i-received-from-google-in-2007-when-they-wanted-to-buy-zlio
======
sillysaurus3
_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)

~~~
wmeredith
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-...](http://business-
ethics.com/2012/08/14/10058-is-22-5-million-dollars-a-big-enough-penalty-for-
google/)

[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#Diff...](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Difficult_to_distinguish_ads_and_content)

[5][https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Ad_l...](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Ad_limit_per_page)

[6][http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-misuses-
mocality-d...](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-misuses-mocality-
database/38789/)

[7][http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-
tweet-185684](http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tweet-185684)

~~~
tptacek
You seem more sure about this than the principal of the impacted company, who
seems to have commented downthread.

A top comment from the last thread about this story:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755386)

Another comment on that thread points out that Amazon also sanctioned them:

[http://techcrunch.com/2007/05/21/zlio-banned-from-
amazon/](http://techcrunch.com/2007/05/21/zlio-banned-from-amazon/)

~~~
wmeredith
Yep, they were spamming and deserved what they got. The point of my comment is
that Google is not to be trusted _at face value_. They have lost that
privilege. In this case, the company that got blacklisted screwed up and you
can prove it by looking at their link profile. So Google did no wrong here in
my eyes.

~~~
sillysaurus3
On the other hand, if I'd realized I'd be starting a Google hate train with my
original comment, I wouldn't have commented. My question was strictly about
this particular case.

No company is perfect. There have been a few distasteful decisions from
Google, but every company has had those. And besides, Google could be far more
evil than it has been. We should probably give them the benefit of the doubt
unless there is some strong evidence.

~~~
wmeredith
>>Google could be far more evil than it has been.

This is the bar they have to clear? Pretty low standards if you ask me.

~~~
magicalist
Yes, Google "scraping" search snippets (using wikipedia as an example even
though it's CC-BY-SA!), which has been a feature of google forever and has
been ruled as fair use on multiple occasions, is a much better standard.

------
ar7hur
A good reminder that an "acquisition proposal" without any indication of price
is not an acquisition proposal. Asking so much information without any such
indication is just crazy.

I strongly recommend this excellent post from Justin Kan:
[http://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-
comp...](http://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company)

~~~
lsc
>A good reminder that an "acquisition proposal" without any indication of
price is not an acquisition proposal. Asking so much information without any
such indication is just crazy.

I... don't know? I know at the low end, you are completely correct. If I had a
nickle every time someone wanted to buy prgmr.com for the ebay value of the
servers, well, I'd be able to buy another server or two.

I ended up being pretty free with my revenue numbers... and yeah, most people
are just sniffing. I guess I wasn't much of a business person, so i didn't
really understand (still don't, really) why those should be super secret.

But on the high end, I would assume (and again, zero experience on the high
end) I would assume that if it were worth google's lawyer time to set up the
deal that they would come out with a price that was, you know, significant
money by my own standards.

------
DanielBMarkham
Seems like there are only two ways to go forward with a startup:

1) Shoot for flipping and acquihire. This is where most folks are going. It
probably makes the most sense for an early 20-something

2) Stay off the radar because you are uncool, using old tech, doing something
stupid, the market's not big enough, or so forth. Bootstrap. Don't do a lot of
PR. Don't get attention, because there are a ton of big companies full of guys
who ran successful startups who are looking for cool things to work on -- if
you don't look the right way, they'll just run over you and do it on their
own.

The game-changers like Uber or Facebook probably start out in category 2 and
then have such incredible momentum and execution intelligence that by the time
they're noticed, it's too late for followers-on. That's a most tricky maneuver
to pull off.

(Note: I know nothing about startups except having a few that didn't pan out,
talking to friends online that have some, working in SV, and reading a lot
about them. I have as much chance of telling you something useful as the
psychic hotline. This is tough stuff.)

------
unreal37
The Techcrunch article announcing the company was closing sheds some more
light[1].

"This decision sentences us... to pay damages for publishing our opinion about
Referencement on Twitter. ... This sentence means we cannot go on. "

Ultimately, they were fined 10,000 Euros (it seems) for slandering their SEO
company on Twitter. But I am sure the challenge of having an open site where
anyone can post anything (and modify their own templates) was the root cause.
It's hard to be totally open to user's content and maintain Google's domain
trust.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/social-ecommerce-site-
zlio-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/social-ecommerce-site-zlio-joins-
the-deadpool/)

------
robk
I think people fail to understand how separate teams work inside Google. In
2007 this would probably have been done by the team working on consumer
products like Google Sites. A deal of this size would have been led by an eng
director and a PM from those teams. These guys are quite separate from search
quality and likely wouldn't even interact much or at all unless they were
previously acquainted. Same goes for ads - the AdSense team (of which I was a
part) wouldn't really ever have input on any search quality decisions and vice
versa. The execs would not make some top down dictat for us to collude or
anything. It just wasn't really done.

------
digitalneal
"You should realise that we make absolutely sure that no engineers working on
similar areas in Google are involved in the assessment of this deal at this
stage so we can avoid tainting"

Didn't they get caught a few months ago doing exactly that? I forget the
company but when they got their documents back from Google they had sticky
notes all over it asking engineers for workarounds to IP... or am I remember
it completely wrong?

------
SoapSeller
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755288)

------
zhte415
The email seems very sloppily written, and while not explicitly threatening,
throughout implies Google is the Goliath while Zlio could be a possible David,
but probably not.

Poorly worded email, asking a lot of sensitive information, with nothing
specific in guarantee, and not following-up on timeline, with non-specific
proposals. Seems like a pretty good reason to avoid a proposal.

~~~
ericd
Lots of execs are crunched enough for time that they write emails a bit
sloppily. Also, these opening emails are usually vague (at least in my
experience) Not really good reasons to not explore, if you're interested in
being acquired.

------
garrettgrimsley
Title should read Zlio, not Zilo.

~~~
cpncrunch
...and it's an exact duplicate of a link posted here 2 years ago.

------
serve_yay
Seems a bit unsporting to just put their email on front street like that, but
I guess on the other hand the way they do these deals is something worth
talking about.

------
dawson
"Finally, Google needed more than 1 month to close the deal."

So, what happened and why did it fall through?

~~~
hobolord
"After waiting for it 30 days, we decided to accept the Mangrove investment
proposal."

~~~
dawson
Yes, no I read that bit, I guess I was just interested in whether Google
started the DD and they were waiting for the formal offer or what part in the
process it fell through at – 30 days isn't very long for an acquisition
process.

------
lvs
"Googlely" would be pronounced as goog-lely, which was obviously not the
desired idea or part of speech. Perhaps the author meant "Googley" which would
be an adjective describing something as Google-like.

------
mkramlich
correlation != causation (necessarily)

could have been innocent reasons, an algo shift. it happens. sometimes you win
the SEO lottery, sometimes they pull the rug out.

my own experience: roughly 3-5 years ago (don't remember off-hand) I woke up
one day to learn that Google had listed me as the top search result, first
page, for a particular combo of terms. I forget exactly what it was but it was
something like "Java Python Flash Linux game developer" or whatever. I had
learned about this from an out-of-the-blue client lead who emailed me. I was
shocked when he said that's how he found me. I then went around to about a
dozen different computers, different types, different geo locations in my
state, both auth'ed and anonymous, and sure enough I always came up as top
result, first page. It was... an awesome time to be taking on
contract/consulting work, let me tell you. So many more leads coming in than
before. Not enough hours in the week/month to help them, had to turn down
otherwise interesting gigs.

Then it came to an end. Rug pulled out. Woke up one day, rankings changed, no
longer on top like that.

Lesson (one anyway): that's a huge eyeball funnel. bazillions of people doing
searches. even getting a tiny slice of it means tons of eyeballs stumbling
upon you. quality is important, of course, being great at what you do, having
the right leads, a good fit, avail, etc. But quantity? That has a quality of
its own.

