CNBC

Whether you're a start-up, family-owned, or publicly traded, there's danger in letting your business rely too heavily on Google search for site traffic.

One morning in May, Linda Stradley woke up to find her online recipe and cooking business in crisis. The number of visitors to the site, which had reached around 5 million a month, was suddenly down by 44 percent, cutting ad earnings by 56 percent.

Google periodically, and without notice, upgrades its service to push spammy websites and content farms lower down in search results. The goal is to create a better Internet, where users are more likely to find the best and most relevant websites based on their search terms.

Google said the latest algorithm change, announced in a tweet from the head of its webspam team on May 20, would affect about 7.5 percent of English queries that are noticeable to users.

While the updates are targeted at bad actors, for people like Stradley, who aren't trying to game the system, they can be devastating. At 72, Stradley works at least eight hours a day and relies on the income from her website and its more than 3,000 pages. She says the costs will be in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Whether in food, travel, personal finance or e-commerce, any website that needs to be discovered needs Google. The company controls 68 percent of the US search market, according to ComScore, and reeled in more than $50 billion in advertising sales in 2013.

Sites like Stradley’s whatscookingamerica.net use Google's ad-serving technology and share revenue with the search engine. Google has made over 890 such improvements in 2013, Jason Freidenfelds, a company spokesman, said.

Imagine the chance to own Time Warner's TBS before the cable network was fully distributed across the country. Or how about CBS before it had convinced cable companies to pay it several hundred million dollars a year to carry its network?

Believe it or not, investors still have a similar opportunity: Tribune. The company, which owns 42 TV stations along with newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, emerged from a four-year bankruptcy in late 2012. Since then, Tribune has been below the radar of most investors because the stock trades over the counter and the company doesn't perform normal functions like investor conference calls.

Yet Tribune is on the verge of turning some of its sleepy assets into big moneymakers.

First consider its portfolio of TV stations, which mainly includes affiliates of 21st Century Fox's Fox and The CW, a joint venture network between Time Warner and CBS. At the moment, those stations generate revenue from advertising, but they are probably earning far less than they should be.

Tribune's other big opportunity is WGN, a so-called superstation based in Chicago that reaches about 75 million homes, according to SNL Financial. WGN carries local Chicago-oriented content like Cubs and Bulls games, along with other filler material like comedy reruns.

Tribune's print business, while not likely to grow much, could also provide a surprise windfall. The company plans to spin it off into a separately listed company in 2014, just as News Corp did in 2013

Google is "pretty sure" your data is safe, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said. Google has upgraded the encryption process it uses to help keep people's information secure, he said.

The company was in the process of improving its encryption process when the Edward Snowden revelations came to light, which made the company expedite the process, Schmidt said.

"We are pretty sure the information that is inside of Google right now is safe from prying eyes, especially the government," Schmidt said. "We think your data is very safe." Schmidt and Google Ideas Director Jared Cohen spoke about the intersection of technology and privacy. While Google is working to protect users' search data from spying, Schmidt said that once someone publishes something online, it's never really going away.

[March 7]