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Google Blocks 'Optimized' Pages
Rhett Creighton writes "For the past few years, webmasters have found tricks that bring their page higher for a given keyphrase search. Google recently implemented a filter to block sites that appeared to be tricking it into gaining a higher ranking. This NYTimes article reports of angry retailers who are losing their businesses, while this article gives more technical conspiracy theories of what google is actually doing."
Seth Finkelstein has been posting a few theories lately on what Google is up to. (Also contains links to other articles.) He suspects they are using some sort of Bayesian filtering around the rule "If a simple search has spam-related keywords, penalize high-spam-scoring results" (spam being search-keyword spam on web pages -- not e-mail spam)
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Google needs to fine tune their code. Enter "goatse.cx" and clicking "I'm Feeling Lucky" brings you to their uptime page at Netcraft, not the horrible image we all know and cherish.
ps: f1st pr0st.
Trolling is a art,
If the purpose of a search engine is to help us find the products/content we're looking for then why are they trying to filter out worthwhile search results? About 50% of the time when I'm searching, I AM looking for vendors of a product in order to do price comparisons. So, if Google turns their search engine into a search engine that ignores those types of search results then they've just moved out of the No.1 position in my favorite search engine list. Maybe I'm missing something....
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
Every month or so, Google updates its database again, and every time, webmasters all over the world whose pages happened to go lower in the rankings complain that Google is broken and the sky is falling. This time is no different, except that mainstream news has picked up the story. Here are a few facts to keep in mind:
1. You can't say with authority that "Google has implemented a filter." Google isn't talking about how their rankings work. The webmasters and SEO types are like astronomers trying to figure out how Google works by observing samples of results. Take everything they say as a theory and nothing more.
2. There's a fine line between making responsibly search-optimized pages and spamming Google, and many of the people who complain are on the spamming side of that line. If you look in the forums where SEO types (and spammers) hang out, 90% of the messages are complaining that their site has disappeared and Google is wrong. If you look in web development forums, 90% of the messages are from people excited to see their pages' position increase.
3. For every webmaster that complains about their site's Google position going down, there are one or more sites whose positions have gone up. Often they're equally deserving of the traffic.
4. There are strong rumors (and some statements from a Google representative) that suggest that this is the last major update to Google's database, and that incremental "freshbot" updates will continue from now on. If this is the case, it may only be a day or a week before your site changes position again, so why complain?
5. Most importantly, notice that it's always webmasters complaining. Never end-users. Guess which group Google considers its customers?
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
Does this mean I can't raise my ranking by linking in my Slashdot sig anymore?
If this stops the hundred odd spam sites coming up every time in now what seems to be every time I search fo a query that involves a dictionary word, then as a veteran web surfer, I'm all for it. But there'll always be a way around the filter, take it a day, a week, a month, a year. Things really can only get worse.
With the huge number of postings on all the various forums, concerning this update, most people don't know where to start looking for information about the recent Google update. The following is an attempt to put down rationally (I hope) most of the information that is known and the (unproven) theories behind the update algo.
Introduction.
Starting on the 16th of November, a major shift in results was seen on Google. Veterans recognised that Google appeared to be doing a major update, not seen for many months, as reported first on WebMasterWorld who named it Florida, continuing the tradition of naming updates rather like hurricanes. In this case it was a hurricane! As was usual with many updates, there were moans and groans as people complained about their sites falling. Many people were unaffected (including us) but the symptoms of the sites being dropped were not usual. No penalties, such as PR0, seem to have been applied against pages that had fallen - yet none of the pages targeted at specific key phrases, particularly index/home pages, appeared in the top results for these search terms. Indeed some had dropped hundreds of places and, in some cases reported, off the scale. Yet these pages did appear for obscure phrases and were obviously still in the index.
It appeared to us and to several other respected names (though hotly disputed by others) that some sort of over-SEOd filter had been applied to check if overt SEO had been done for that particular phrase. It was as if Google were checking to see if external links to the site included the phrase, on-page optimisation was being done for the phrase and even if the domain included the phrase. If the density of the optimisation, both on and off the page, appeared too artificial, then a filter was tripped and down went the page - solely for that phrase.
Google had never looked favourably on abuse of their systems and many established SEOs looked upon this algo tweak as a way of Google getting rid of the abuses of links and stopping the scrambling for getting (and sometimes buying) links including your required anchor text from other high PR, but probably irrelevant to your subject, sites. It seemed to make sense.
On Friday, 21st November, Google decided to tighten the filter. All hell broke loose as tens of thousands of sites disappeared from positions they had held (in some cases) for years. We noticed some of our client sites plummeting for their major key phrase from being #1 to total invisibility. Yet this was only in highly competitive areas, not for their secondary phrases. These sites were, in most cases, not highly optimised, had not sought reciprocal links but had achieved their rankings through being on the web for 4 or 5 years. The bad news was that their company name and domain included the key phrase, sites (including directories) linking to those sites included the key phrase in their links and Google interpreted this as over-optimisation and down they plunged. In many areas all the top 20 ranking sites disappeared, including industry leaders, to be replaced by educational sites, news review sites, government sites, major shopping portals or directories. Something major had happened - but what?
The Facts!
Thousands of web pages have been suddenly demoted in the Google search results, primarily on the main commercial search terms for which they targeted their pages to be replaced by other sites who, in the main, referred to the search term obliquely. Several were the main shopping portals or business directories which gave listings for companies who may provide the services requested, many were not.
Very high-ranking authority sites seemed to be unfiltered.
The changes were starkly obvious on regional English language Googles where a regional filter was employed and there were less commercial sites with authority.
An example for Google UK is the search for the word shelving. On the
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
I for one really don't give a rip if retailers throw a hissy over this. When I search the web it's because I want information, not because I want to buy something.
If I want to buy something I use Froogle. That's what it's there for.
The real moral here is that if you're depending on your placement in a search engine for free advertising, you'd better have a backup plan.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Google was my #1 tool to find my penis enlargement products.
Now I can't even get a home loan!!! And I can't consolidate my debts!!!
What am I gonna do???
I wrote a small software app for a the company I work for, and someone linked to it from a discussion forum.
.exe file.
That gave that name of that program xxxxx.exe 1 hit on google. About 3 days later a search for the xxxxx.exe provided 3 hits, two of them were porn sites that somehow harvested the name of our
While it's not a huge deal, I e-mailed Google and heard nothing for 4 days. I didn't expect a response and told them that in my e-mail. However then I recieved a personalized (not a form) e-mail regarding my comments and that they'd take the issue seriously.
24 hours later they were able to filter out these porn sites that were harvesting new terms that appeared in Google.
I gotta say props out to the boys there, it's one classy establishment.
Olagam
Google - thanks abound from me. I personally find it distasteful when I'm searching for research on a particular topic. More times than not - most of the top listings are by an amazon or other shopping portal that has NOTHING to do with my search.
Yes, many businesses are being hurt by GOOGLE's policy - however, it is GOOGLE's search engine! They have done nothing wrong but try and give authentic results to their Web Surfing friends.
Google has a specialized tool to access their search engine specifically to do shopping/price comparison... So yes, you are missing something. :)
Besides, these sites were using hacks to artificially inflate their pagerank instead of providing a higher quality site to increase it.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Given the underlying reason why google is a good search engine (leveraging the popularity of the site by others), I don't want "my" search engine to be fooled into giving me commercially-orientated results.
If Google has re-organised the page-ranking system to cut out the link-merchants, I give it an unreserved thumbs up
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
...is no substitute for a business plan.
So some people are trying to cheat the system, and Google is taking steps to prevent this. Good for them, I say. I'm tired of getting pages that appear to be legitimate, only to find that they're just redirect fillers.
As for Google's practices in general, retailers are free to moan and groan about their rankings, but there is no obligation for Google to specifically cater to their needs. If Google decided to change its algorithms, such that all links were turned alphabetically rather than by PageRank, they would be well within their rights to do so. Of course, I imagine that such a move would result in many people seeking other search engines soon enough.
Don't they realize that Google wasn't created for them? Rather, it is created for surfers. There is one surefire way to get noted on Google if your business depends on it: advertise. You get what you pay for.
The writeup made it sound as if the NY Times article was about upset retailers mad at google when really they're upset at the company that was tricking the search results.
for "boost page ranking", and got this cheesy online marketing company:
http://www.page-rank.boost-web-site-traffic.com/
My first reaction was that these guys are scam artists. But, they did appear at the top of the page...
Obviously it is still possible to scam google. To web experts: how do they do it?
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
The free search engine that listed me for free is no longer paying off! Waaaaaa! Waaaaaa!
I for one welcome the change. Too many times have 20 of the top 30 links taken you two one site, but camafloged to google somehow as to look seperate. I experieced this painfully while looking for ringtones for my cellphone.
Google is first and foremost a search engine, not a marketing tool. Those who thought otherwise are finding out they are sorely mistaken.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Despite my personal pride in being one who tries to grasp a concept/issue via multiple sources from different perspectives, i just realized that the vast majority of my information these days funnels through google. And i know i am not alone.
I would wager google's potential control of information distribution and content filtering rivals that of major centralized information outlets like CNN or the NY times. Kinda unnerving.
From the second linked article:
An example for Google UK is the search for the word "shelving"... On the main Google search for the same phrase, the results return 1 site that sells shelving, 6 shopping portals, 2 Universities and 1 Amazon store. Yet previously these results showed 9 shelving suppliers.
What does this guy expect? He searches on a single word and expects that every result be a retailer? Why not add some extra terms, like "buy" or "seller" or "retail" after that, buddy?
Seriously, should I start crying foul when I search Google for "dog" and it returns information on breeds rather than specific pet-stores?
most of the non-/.-reading public hasn't heard of froogle...
On the flip side, I help run a set of mailing lists for car enthusiasts. We've been around for 12-13 years, and we have archives that cover almost all of that. We were using htdig, and it sucked/broke a lot, so we tried google's search, and it sorta worked ok(mailing list archives are horrible for google because of the crosslinking etc)
Until recently- the last year or so is when we started noticing problems. The last 6 months, complaints about holes and odd behavior have skyrocketed; for example, you can search for "master cylinder 2003" and get some posts, but search for "master cylinder" and 90% of the time, you won't find anything from 2003 in any of the results. The whole seems to be from about 2001-2003, and some messages simply can't be found.
I emailed google pointing out the problem, and after 2-3 weeks, got a long-walk-short-pier kind of email that basically said "we can't really control how much we index, sucks to be you". Thanks google.
Soon as we find a free, full-text search DB engine that doesn't suck, we're switching....we'll probably give htdig another shot, but it'd be nice to have something a little smarter.
Please help metamoderate.
Google needs to separate commercial pages from purely informational pages. Anyone searching for information (not sales products) gets inundated with e-commerce sites. It's a waste of time, building complex queries that weed out dominant company names. affiliate sites, and words like "cart."
Google needs to expand its advanced search options to include toggles for different ranking criteria. Anyone who has searched in vain knows this. I have several dead-end searches every week.
Google needs to change it's outdated automatic e-mail reply blurb. Staff may read every e-mail received but saying "[we] try to send personal responses to each message" is just baloney. That was true in the early years.
Google needs to get off its laurels and start listening to its customers again.
i've kinda felt like in the past few weeks i've noticed my searching improved. it seemed for a while that i would never see a homemade page without going to page 6 of results. in addition, even though .net .org and .com aren't followed as well as they were a few years ago, if you do a search that will just include .com sites, you will see more companies turn up
just put "site:com" in the search.
what im worried about right now is google doing the ipo thing and becoming a lot less useful. we will see.
...think about it for a moment. Some searches return mainly academic institutions and not commercial entities. So google might have gone...
"Hmm...if peoples businesses are no longer on the first page what are they going to do? Bingo...they are going to pay for sponsored matches to stay in the game!".
And lo and behold...we have finally found out what should replace ???????? !
Step 1)Create worlds largest and most popular search engine
Step 2)Shaft lots of commercial sites that use the most searched for keywords, causing lots more people to purchase sponsored matches
Step 3)Profit!!!
As the article said, it seems to be only the most popular search terms. Which means probably those that require the highest price per click on their sponsored matches. Now, more people will try for sponsored matches on those keywords, pushing the price up (artificially) high.
We are always warned about the dangers of a monopoly/monoculture, and this is precisely why.
I am NaN
Every scumbag with a copy of Frontpage and $19.99 a month for web hosting is trying to become a millionaire with affilate commissions.
The more Google does to obscure the peddlers of obnoxious scams and "get rich quick" Amway types, the better.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
And then:
Microsoft releases MSN Music Club
SCO sues Apple
Microsoft releases Sparkle
SCO sues Macromedia
Microsoft ships new Xbox model
SCO sues Sony
Gates farts
SCO sues the dog
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I have little sympathy for companies that get blocked because they set up lots pseudo-identical sites in an effort to garner better google restults.
No company that relies upon their website for business should fail to account for their google rankings. To not do so is dangerous. This means preparing one's site for googlebots and heeding it's terms and conditions.
Not that I'm saying it's not unfair that google wields this much power. But it does.
--- We have a pool and a pond, the pond would be good for you.
I run a teeny Miva Merchant site which used to be a 'regular' (html, cgi) web store. It has been up since 1997 with little or no changes. No meta tags or keywords on the site.
A week after I messed with that stuff, Google put my site at the top of the list when you do a search for some uncommon keywords related to it. It was nice to see, but so far of limited usefulness.
Now with the Miva site (which are notorious for not being indexed) I will have to come up with a revised strategy.
I would tell anyone - pay attention to your tags, and the immediate content of your site. Everyone is fighting for placement using similar keywords, so checkout the top results and see what they are using.
OT - Doesn't Barry look like he's making some deal on the phone? "Yeah, I can get you Ted, but he's gonna cost ya. He's huge at the Laugh 'n' Snort. I think he'll go for that, I'll call ya back."
I suppose it is just another symptom of monoculture. It would be real nice to have two or three search engines that were reliable and shared the market space. OTOH, it is a 'free' service, so I am not complaining, and am happy to have such a service.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
... no, not at all!
Rather, it was that thousands of obscure websites got promoted!
Think Half Full, not Half Empty!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Lately some search results have been filled with spam pages designed purely for climbing up the page ranking scale on a site that may not offer the information you are looking for.
I think google should make a modification to the google bar so users can rank a sites relevancy.Kinda like StumbleUpon (I think thats the name).Users can weed out the spam results and we can get the great search results google once used to provide...
As a long time user of Google and a reasonably large advertiser - our company is now questoning whether Google will survive the next couple of years. Through contacts, we have pointed out to Google (and submitted spam reports and submitted poor results reports) that one of our competitors has 2,700 duplicate doorway entry pages to their site. Several hundred of those are illegally indexed using "our" trademarked name. We also advised them of another competitor with 159,000 doorway pages - all indexed and showing up in results. Google's response . . . (silence)
Do this search and you will NOT see a web site listed that actually tells you the calories in a Bagel. I think Google is doing the RIGHT thing,in fact they should do it even MORE:
Try apple calories, fruit calories, etc... same thing
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
Google updates every month, and every month webmasters throw hissy fits over PR and SERPs.
I get SEO spam simply for being the technical contact for a couple of domains at work, and I will bet my bottom dollar that anyone who does business with those people will be wiped of the map come the next update.
By contrast, all the sites I manage still show up as usual. I've been no.1 on key terms for a while, simply 'cos the sites provide relevant, useful info in a well-structured manner, and doesn't mess around with Google.
One thing I am curious about is whether or not Stuart Langridge's accessible image replacement technique counts as an attempt at spamming Google: after all, it hides header text behind images...
Not really. "I'm feeling lucky" that I, unlike the gentleman in the picture, do not have a 6" diameter asshole.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The problem being that the vast majority of people doing a search for 'Dawson Creek' are probably looking for the TV show and not your small town in British Colombia. Don't ask me why, the show is terrible. So surely this is a different problem than search obscuration by comerical web spam? That search obscuration by fans of seriously bad teen drama.
Warning! This post may contain a pun!
After suspecting I was being scammed by my mortgage broker, I types "Mortgage broker scams" into google. I'm in favor of google doing anything it needs to do to stop garbage like this.
o ke r_scams.htm
This is the type of link I got back. The last paragraph is my favorite:
http://www.mortgage-broker-in-1.com/mortgage_br
The text of the page, that was followed by a LOT of links:
"Sourcing on the web for the best deals on mortgage broker scams? Well you've definitely arrived at the right place because that's what we're information experts in. Of course, being a new information web portal we don't yet have a monumental amount of information on the precise search term you were looking for - mortgage broker scams, but we're getting there.
Locating relevant and useful mortgage broker scams sites is often difficult. Which is why we created this website. Detailed research went into building this web site on mortgage broker scams to send you to the best web sites.
Coming across the best mortgage broker scams websites isn't as easy as it sounds. After a meeting of our team of planners and engineers we decided to build this site to assist you with your navigation. I'm thrilled to say that the countless hours of work we did studying info databases on mortgage broker scams for you to visit.
As the mushrooming of e-commerce continues mortgage broker scams businesses learn more in offering their products and services for sale The biggest benefit that the web mortgage broker scams businesses will maintain over store-front mortgage broker scams businesses is the significant savings they have an operating a successful business.
A few days ago I tried a seach for "cellular customer satisfaction". The first several pages were bogus resellers (many of them the same page under different URL's). None of them contained the kind of information I needed about how customers rate the various cellular service providers. This morning the same search is yielding lots of useful data instead of the fake spam-like pages I had been getting.
KUDOS to Google for fixing this! Whatever changes they've made to their pagerank algorithm, Google is suddenly working again like I expect.
Life is short: void the warranty.
Google's "PageRank" formula is their top-secret way of determining in which order to display websites for any given keyword. Everyone knows that refering links is the main component of PageRank, but Google has always been hush-hush as to what else is included in the formula.
It's also known that PageRank isn't a static formula. Google reserves the right to change it at any time, in what is known by Google-watchers as a "Google Dance".
The only legit way to be highly ranked by Google is to be the most authoritative source for information about whatever you discuss, and naturally links will form from other quality websites on your topic and up the PageRank scale you go. www.microsoft.com being a 10/10 ranking doesn't indicate that Google likes Microsoft, it just simply indicates that site is the most authoritative site about a topic a lot of people talk about, Microsoft's products.
Any other way to cheat the system will result in penalties applied to your score. It's not so much a filter as it is negative factors in the formula. Google steadfastly claims that it doesn't maintain a blacklist of "bad" sites, but it is clear that sites designed to cheat Google's PageRank formula always fail once Google tweaks the formula. They don't need a blacklist, they simply identify the characteristics that define a "link farm" and then apply a penality. If a given site has a lot of links to external domains, very little non-link content, and absoulutely every linked to site returns a link back to the orignal site, it sure smells like a link farm and that's what the system penalizes.
To put it bluntly, anybody who's business depends on being displayed on the first page of Google results should be buying AdWords placements. If you're working hard to stay #1 in the editorial results, you're never gonna win. And no, just because your business depends on it doesn't mean you get to sue when Google pulls an ill-gotten #1 ranking out from under you.
Funny -- one of the sites I run recently took a hit in the rankings, and we didn't do much optimization. I researched it last night and found that Google has just rolled back to a very old version of their data. Last week the title tags they were showing for our site were up to date, but now they are showing data from over a month ago.
I wonder if this rollback was in response to the complaints?
In any case, without much trickery we were able to get relatively good ranking in the latest (pre-rollback) version just by having actual content and decent title & meta tags.
Cheers.
What I'd love to see is Google block all those stupid search sites... you know the ones that make there google result look like an interesting page but when you click it you get a page that has 50% adverts and some search results for whatever you where searching for ...... those really bug me.
I've seen the online retailer rage first-hand...
It's thier own fault. I'm sorry. Google doesn't OWE them anything. They aren't paying google.. google is indexing the web, not promoting their business.
People who do all kinds of work and fuss over how to perfectly optimize their page so they will get a higher google ranking than all their competitors... they need to understand that there are no rules in the game they are playing.
IT's also common sense that, if Google is what makes or breaks your business, you should understand all the risks involved.
Google is a service that is, for the most part, free to those who benefit from it.
Somebody discovers that they can manipulate this service to increase their benefit.
The people who provide this (free) service chose to ignore those manipulations. Maybe they deliberately lower the ranking of some pages, to hear the whiny TFH crowd speak.
Then those same whiners--who contributed NOTHING to the process from which they benefit--scream for damages.
If someone invented a pill to make people immortal and one of these jerks didn't get his pill, these same folks would want the inventor jailed for murder.
Until you form a union and negotiate a contract with google--that includes a "past practices" clause, just STFU.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I know p2p search is hopeless, but here's some ideas on how to do it anyways. I'll phrase it like an inductive proof: first make a node, then add a neighbor.
NODE - I'd use Lucene. Lucene is a traditional keyword search engine that is fast, lean, free and open. It's carried under the Apache Jakarta project, so it's not going anywhere. And, it's easy to develop with. Alternatively, any good search will do... you could probably bang something together with GNU shell utils.
NEIGHBOR - Turn search into a common TCP/IP protocol, a la SMTP, FTP, etc.. Telnet to port 534268 (the digits that most look like "SEARCH"), and have something like this:
If there are no results at that node, the server forwards you on:
So, you'd start by querying your own host's search-engine. Perhaps it would spider N-deep from what you browse, so it would perhaps have ready responses for many of your queries.
But your own node may not have the answer for you, so you forward on to the next. How does the forwarding table get setup? One way to do it would be by hand, but also, I imagine posting "known expert" lists to gnutella could help automate the process. A list would be a map of keywords to IPs. These lists wouldn't need to be too robust, as they'd serve to occasionally seed the network, not constantly sustain it.
Once you had a good forwarding table on your node, you'd have access to quite a large search DB. With 100 nodes in the search network, each using 1GB for its index, and 3:10 index to indexed ratio, that's 100*1GB*3.3=330GB of indexed text. Let's say the average webpage is 100KB (?), that's a total search DB size of 3.4M pages. Increase the number of nodes to 10,000 and increase each node's index size to 10GB, and you have 3,460,300,800 pages, which is just about equal to Google, which is currently at 3,307,998,701. 10k nodes happens to be about what distributed.net is running right now, and 10GB is getting cheaper by the minute. ;)
If you have trouble finding reviews of peripherals among all the links to stores selling the peripherals, add one of the following keywords to your search:
I was looking for ringtones for my Ericsson phone a few weeks ago, and (literally) the first 3 pages were all sham sites that were filled with ads and lead back to - you guessed it - www.ringingphone.com!
Those sham sites are no longer showing up in the Google results, and I can actually find what I was looking for instead of having to wade through the cesspool shopping mall that the internet is turning into.
Email was a wonderful thing until some cretins decided it was their god given right to fill the infrastructure so full of shit that it's becoming impossible to maintain and of much more limited use, all because they're so much more important that everyone else and want to hock their crap.
IRC was a wonderful thing until some other pack of cretins decided it was their god given right to deluge the infrastructure with shit, all because they're so much more important than everyone else and want to have their immature little pissing contests
And the web and the search engine concept was a wonderful thing until yet another pack of cretins decided it was their god given right to deluge THIS infrastructure with shit, because they believe that this great big network exists soley to promote their crap
So who gave them all the fucking right!? And why are these pieces of shit always the first to whine about how THEIR rights are being trodden on? I just wonder what sort of process makes these pricks honestly believe that such a beautiful and diverse resource is there for THEIR benefit and it's all fucking ME ME ME.
OK I can play ME ME ME too! I want to be able to browse the internet without your fucking product being shoved in my face!
I want to be able to communicate with my friends and colleagues over email without having hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of dreck advertising your disgusting crap shoved in my face!
I want to be able to use a realtime chat network without enduring splits and lags and security checks and masses of scans just because some braindead 12 year old moron got a bug up his ass about someone insulting him over this system!
Why is it that these days if you look at an IRC server or an SMTP server, 90% of the source is a ghastly and hugely tangled mess of code that's just there to keep the 0.001% of pricks who want to ruin it for everyone else out, and managing those systems turns from a straightforward and communal activity into an arcane battleground where everyone is an enemy? Just try scaling that up tenfold for Google and their golden egg laying goose that every selfish twat wants to work how THEY want it to work and fuck everyone else.
Argh... I would be honoured to shake the hands of the techs running Google, and good on them for actually fighting back against these fucks. And as for these cretins listed above, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES WE WILL MAKE SAUSAGES OUT OF YOUR FUCKING ENTRAILS (to borrow a nice little expression from someone by the alias of TRASG0)
I didn't expect a reply, but several days later I got a personal response from someone at google explaining what they were going to do about the problem and agreeing with what I said.
Indeed, a very classy establishment, especially when compared to other U.S.-based companies these days...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Another wierd coincidence - by the end of the next quarter, they're supposed to go public (Google IPO - oogles of $$$).
Another wierd coincidence - With Yahoo's recent acquirement of Overture, and the ownership of multiple search technologies, it is rumored that they may end their contract with Google soon, and power their own search.
Another wierd coincidence - MS "trying" to develop a better search engine, already trying to take on Google, even before Longhorn.
Now isn't that a great way to drastically increase their revenue prior to becoming public by making all the top searched commercial sites pay for ads on Google, especially when a bulk of those sites' revenue come from the upcoming holiday season?
Wow - Google seems to also know how to play chess!
That's why I have to laugh whenever I read stories speculating that Microsoft might do to Google what they did to Netscape. It's one thing to steal a big consulting/integration contract by throwing lots of marketing and engineering resources at the customer. But to dominate the search engine world, you have to earn and maintain the trust of millions of users who pound on your engine every single minute. I used to think that Infoseek, Altavista, and the others died solely from corporate neglect. That's partially true, but they were doomed anyway, as soon as Google appeared. Because none of them ever understood what Brin and company seem to understand instinctively -- a public search engine requires hard work on a huge scale, and it never stops.
It's great that Google continues to tweak there search engine to produce the most accurate results. The people complaining are the commercial businesses that are relying on Google search results for free advertising. First off, these "businesses" should not be relying solely on Google search result hits for traffic to their sites, they have to advertising somewhere. Secondly, Google has every right, and duty, to continue battling against businesses from gaming the search results.
My sites have probably increased in position on Google because of these changes, but I don't plan on reducing my advertising budget.
LoRider
Obviously, depending on Google's free side to support a business is risky -- but the alternatives just aren't all that pleasant.
I help run a small business on the side -- http://www.beadstore.com. We are one of the good stores on the web -- we sell a specialty high quality product that has a small but dedicated global following. We provide a fair amount of information about each product and excellent customer service.
We are also reliant upon Google for a huge percentage of our online business.
Realizing that free listings were completely hit or miss, we began advertising on Google through Ad Words. Since then we've been spending anywhere between $500 and $3000 a MONTH on advertising -- which for a small business like ours is a huge hit.
And yes, we've spent countless hours trying to optimize our page position in Google. But we've never resorted to the kind of sleazy tactics some use. So when Google "tweaks" its code and the whole Google Dance shifts, it can mean major rewards or huge costs. What is a small business supposed to do? We have basically two options -- forgo advertising and be forever subject to Google's whims, or pay what amounts to our single largest operating expense (besides inventory) to guarantee some sort of Google traffic. I guess the third alternative is to bypass Google directly, but that's a tough way to go, though we try whenever we can.
So I have a fair amount of sympathy for the good eggs out there trying to run a website business, not because they ever have a realistic hope of becoming dot-com millionaires, but because they love their product. Google is a fickle mistress -- and while we may not have many options, showing a little sympathy when one of us gets dumped isn't really such a bad thing.
Oh, I can only dream.... No more "Enhanced For Internet Explorer 5 and Higher" sites!
Constitutionally Correct
Unbe-freaking-lievable what weird ideas of entitlement people have when it comes to free services.
In any case it's simply very poor business sense to rely solely on being listed in the top 10 Google results for the search "fruit basket" to get any business.
It seems to me that the real source of the problem is in an assumption by Google, and most other search engines, that they can provide a purely string based search without any semantic context.
...) that select the a particular customized search algorithm in the Google engine. This proviudes enough info to direct the user to a customized algorithm tailored for the users expected type of results. In some respects, this is what Froogle and the other google specialty searches are about, except through the front page interface. This also provides a legitimate hook into bringing blogs back into the fold without interfering other users by looking for reviews and/or user comments.
For the issue at hand, the new filtered results implicitly assume no site can legitimately grab too many links above some threshold for non-trademarked words. But in the case of a shelving provider being referenced as "shelving" (as exampled in the second article), that is not the case. The result is commercial entities with a high PageRank are filtered out.
This is fine for users looking up info about shelving, but not for user looking to buy shelving. Hence my comment on semantic context. In this case, a simple drop down of search prefixes ("I want info about...", "I want to buy...",
And in traditional Google fashion, Google could provide links to possible alternative searches in other semantic contexts, just like they already do with spelling and the like.
The prefix approach is only one possibility. Maybe a sentence parser would be better (if you can convince current users to convert from keyword searches).
It appears they finally did something about that. Most door pages, particularly in porn, stuffed keywords for Google to see, then send everyone else to the porn site via metarefresh=. It avoided SafeSearch and caused situations such as Junior searching on medieval castles for a book report and getting page after page of results sending him to Victoria's Torture and Bondage Castle (with popups).
Also, pages with too many advertiser-only tricks seem to be down. They are still there, but fewer. I guess this is being sidestepped by setting up apache to giving Google ip's one version of a page, and everyone else the real page.
Spammers *DO* know about Bayesian filters. Of late a large cross section of my spam is arriving with a random block of words in the semi-non-display tags and footer-esque parts of the page. These words have nothing even remotely to do with the nature of the advertised "product" or "service".
This is clearly a response to the Bayesian filter.
The same hacks who make the spam generating software are right there ready to sell their meta-crime to the web-varnishers.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
On the other hand, when IE first appeared it really was something of a joke. It was just a rebranded version of Spyglass Mosaic that Microsoft hurriedly licensed when they realized that they'd ignored the Internet for too long. Lots of silly bugs and poorly designed features.
But that's all beside the point. I wasn't talking about the browser war -- I never even mentioned browsers. IE played a part in destroying Netscape, but only a small part. Netscape's main source of revenue was supposed to be on the server side. This was true even before Microsoft destroyed the market for browsers by making IE a freebie. But once Microsoft became a competitor, Netscape had no hope of selling its server software or integration services.
I remember a news article, '97 or thereabouts, about Netscape and MS competing for a major integration contract. (Can't remember the name of the customer.) MS, being late to the party, didn't even jump in until Netscape almost had the whole thing wrapped up. All the specifics had been negotiated and agreed to, and only the final formalities were left. Then MS beseiged the customer with a massive sales pitch, a huge and expensive prototype, and of course a lowball bid. (When you have MS's revenue streams, you can afford to take a huge loss just to get a long-term customer.) Netscape never knew what hit them.
That sort of thing explains most of MS's dominance of the software market. But it doesn't work against somebody like Google, which essentially depends on millions of small customers who can't be easily turned.