Google's fight to keep search a secret
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
It's not like the government is propping up Google or that if anybody is locked in as a user in the search market. There are already a huge number of search engine and information filters.
As you say, there is very little customer lock-in, so there should be a high bar for calling Google a monopoly. On the other hand, there is a large entry cost for the search martket.
And Google's "monopoly" is very much based on it's reputation - remember how quickly we all jumped ship from Alta Vista - and surely Bing and Yahoo provide enough competition that if Google _were_ manipulating search returns in obviously monopolistic ways, people would notice and publish evidence soon enough?
Second, Google has an astounding 63% market share, which would be considered a monopoly in almost all industries.
Third, people "noticed" Microsoft's monopolistic tactics, but that doesn't mean that they weren't effective or didn't continue for a long time, largely unpunished.
I'll call Google a monopoly when they buy off Microsoft to shut down Bing and buy out DuckDuckGo. Their practices are occasionally questionable, but that doesn't constitute a monopoly in and of itself.
It's not, but it's clear that the legal nature of it seems to be besides the point.
Who needs rule of law when you have uninformed opinion being passed around the campfire?
You'd be closer to the mark accusing the iPhone of having a monopoly on telephony simply because it costs money to buy a different one.
[citation needed] I haven't heard "the public" complaining about not knowing how Google ranks results. That seems to be limited to spammers and the journalists they dupe into their sob stories.
Disclaimer: I am very freaking interested in Google rankings, since they determine my ability to eat.
Can you honestly say you would prefer that your site be ranked lower than that of a competitor with better information?
I have been participating on this site for a year. Do I strike you as a spammer?
I care that my site ranks at the top of Google, and I also want the results to be useful. Those aren't in opposition, any more than "I want to make money" and "I want to help customers teacher their children better" are in opposition. Google would love people to think they are in opposition, though, because that means that any change they make in favor of their business interests over other business' interests feels like an unquestionable command handed down by God.
I know for a fact that the "just provide good content" line by Google is complete bullshit.
"Just provide good content" indeed isn't enough. What we should also be saying is that you shouldn't count on Google's search results to do your marketing for you. It's difficult for Google's search results to "lead" the internet. If something isn't already somewhat popular, it's hard for us to discover it, though we try very hard. What I'd suggest is to try to market your site through more conventional ways without worrying about search engines. If real people demonstrate that they like your site when exposed to it, the ball is in our court, and it's really our fault for not ranking you well enough.
However, if not enough people have been exposed to it, there's still more you need to do on your end.
Send the site along, and I'll see if there are any issues I can tell you about.
I know it is an uphill struggle for Google against all the spammers and I am sure Google is trying to rank the best sites as the highest ones. It just gets frustrating at times.
The site is http://mondhandy.de - page 6 for the keyword "mondkalender" (it is also German). Some of the sites before it are fair, but I think it is obvious that there are many that are worse than my site. For example, some are just sites where you can order a book about the moon calendar.
I think I did most of the "on site" improvements, but I don't have many inbound links, and the domain name is weird.
I plan to move to http://mondkalender.us soon, hoping that I won't be punished too much for running a German site on a .us domain. Also finally want to launch an English language version (although I think the topic is not popular outside of Germany).
Also plan to improve the widget - just wondering, do iframes also count as inbound links? That was my secret master plan to generate links, to make lots of blogs include my widget. The widget really needs improving, though.
Once I entered the site in some catalogs. A while later I noticed the ranking had really tanked. I guess that was a big mistake. I tried to remove it, but it wasn't possible for all of them. On the other hand it seems it shouldn't be too bad, otherwise it could be used to damage the competition (enter them into catalogs, too).
Anyway, I plan to give the site one last push, so that I can say I have tried what I could. Also planning on an Android and an iPhone app, so that I have everything covered. Suggestions are of course very welcome.
Your competitors are working the google game. If google was open with how they rank sites it would get much much worse.
If people really didn't trust Google, they'd go elsewhere.
There's an agenda at work here, very obviously.
More simply put, there are a growing number of * who would like to get a piece of that google action.
Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Google to be required to open their algorithm, I don't like this reason. It is security by obscurity. Spammers can only take advantage of flaws in Google's algorithm. By opening it to the public, I'm sure the algorithm itself would be improved.
The real reason Google doesn't want to expose it is that it is a competitive advantage. They should be upfront about that at least.
Search engine providers who are also advertisers have a agent problem -- there is moral hazard. Anybody who has money betting on where an item shows up in a result list should not also be able to create the list. This is like going to the Ford car dealership and asking for an analysis of all the types of cars to buy. Even if the Ford guys give you an independently-created report recognized as the world's best authority on car purchases, it doesn't feel right. In ethics, if it looks wrong, it is wrong.
Having said that, regulating anything that returns a list is idiotic. Even regulating Google because of it's gatekeeper status doesn't work -- these things always sound good for the edge cases, but once you let the camel's nose in under the tent, the rest of the camel is soon to follow
I think what's called for here is an industry-sponsored certification program. Use outside auditors, establish quality metrics, create a set of public ethical guidelines. You can always have trusted outsiders check your work against those guidelines, even in IP-rich, and trade secret areas. Companies do this all the time.
Google's (and Microsoft before it) main problem is that it is successful. Lots of political-type folks see that success and imagine all sorts of ways that the government can/should get in there and muck around. In this case I'm on Google's side.
But as far as thinking Google is somehow magic, that SEO is evil, that "writing good content" is all you need for rankings? All of that is bullshit put out by Google to make themselves more of an authority than they actually are. They run a program to put things in an ordered list. People are going to hack the program. Neither of these two things are good, bad, or especially interesting. The interesting thing here, to me, is the degree of Google fanboy-ism that some folks have. Wish I could bottle that up.
Google is just an advertising agency who had some cool ideas on ranking a decade or more ago. They are not a bunch of knights riding in on white horses. Oddly enough, their success is the very thing that's hurting them.