It took us a few days to dig our way out of our inboxes after this week, but we made it out alive and in one piece. Even better than that, we came back with some friends. We opened up the club to the public the night before The New York Times was published and we’ve been thrilled to see people joining the club all week. We watched as people came in from our appearance on Bloomberg TV and Ryan Cooper’s article in the week. It’s one thing to watch our friends and family sign up and a whole other thing when random strangers we don’t know sign up because they like what we have to say and want us to say it more often and louder. And, beyond the club opening up for business, we watched along with the world as major case after major case dropped on Google’s head, even after Google started out the week by crashing. So, to all the people who signed up this week, we say welcome, what an interesting time to join the club!
We’ve had a chance to talk to many of our new members and, as could be expected, they are all cool people doing interesting things. Some of them are website operators and SEO professionals tired of not having any option besides playing by Google’s rules. Others are hard at work at creating search engines that compete with Google, each butting heads against Google’s web crawling monopoly in their own way. And there are also, when you get down to it, people who felt betrayed by Google and their turning their back on the open web. Everybody has their own reason for joining and we are happy that they found us and joined us in the fight.
In so many ways, these new members who we don’t know, are who we’ve been doing this all for the past few years. We had seen so many comments out there in the forums and on social media of people asking for ways to regulate Google and asking for a public cache and open index that we just took it as an article of faith that people would support this project when it came out. This week is when that faith gets tested and we are really happy to see so many people signing up. To our new members, we promise to fight as hard as we can to get regulations on Google in place as fast as we can.
And to those who are still holding out, please consider this your personal invitation to join the club. we’re taking on one of the most powerful companies in the world — we can’t win if we stand apart. We want your help in this fight, so, how about you join the club and we start working together to get an public cache and an open index. So, come on in, we’re having a great time and making it happen.
– Zack Maril, on behalf of the Knuckleheads’ Club