Hacker News Reader

Comment by zone411 | Hacker News Reader

Until recently, I believed that while Google abuses its search dominance in order to promote its own services above the fold, their actual search results are still fair. Then I saw the search results for "domains" and "domain." It is a big stretch to imagine how a fair algorithm can rank recently launched beta of Google Domains #4 and #1 against the competitors, such as GoDaddy or NameCheap, or even against informational websites.

View on HN

That depends on how you define fair, I guess. If this isn't a hardcoded bonus for "google.com" and instead all established, high-PageRank sites receive the same benefit, is it still not fair?

There's a not well-known component of Google ranking that acts sort of like a slow-moving, domain-wide PageRank. And because they launched domains.google.com as a subdomain of google.com, which contains PageRank 10 pages and is therefore very trusted, the assumption is that domains.google.com is also very trusted, even though it currently seems to have no inbound links from other google.com pages.

This effect is usually hidden because it's rare to have a highly ranked page with no obvious inbound links competing on an established keyword.

I just searched for domains (from the UK) and the only reference to Google Domains I see is an advert. If you see differently, I guess there's some reason for that, but it doesn't seem to happen everywhere.

That might simply be because Google Domains is US only.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com