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Google Delists BMW-Germany
Raenex writes "The car maker BMW has had its German website bmw.de delisted from Google. The delisting was punishment for using deceptive means to boost page ranking, which has now been set to zero for BMW. Matt Cutts, a Google employee who works to stop unethical search manipulation, originally reported the delisting in his blog and suggests that camera maker Ricoh is not far behind."
perfidity that BMW was perpetrating, it also illustrates the large and growing power of google, a power that may not always be used for optimal "goodness."
Is it fascism yet?
This happened a while ago... it was old when digg.com listed it.
You could at least add a link to the blog entry you mention. Like, say, this one.
Sheesh.
Does anyone know a list of the pages they have done this to and/or a list of things that they consider to be done to increase pagerank?
I kind of wish they would delist the whole 'blogosphere too, or at least allow us to set an option to not show 'blogs in our searches. I mean, pagerank abuse is rampant on 'blogs (example)(.
They were spamming, they broke the rules google set, bammo, pagerank=0.
They're still listed on Yahoo (and other search engines).
If google nuked the pagerank of someone who isn't intentionally spamming, like slashdot, we'd all have a right to be screaming bloody murder. But this makes perfect sense.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
It will be used for optimum profit. Ignoring the few aberrations, if you draw the line-of-best-fit for Google's actions over the next few years, you will find it fits the function of self-interest.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
So people who search for BMW won't be able to find the official BMW site? Somehow, that doesn't sound like a very good search engine.
...BMW. Matt Cutts....
Oh my GOD! I'm having flashbacks to geometry! Damn those textbooks creatively using letters to demonstrate rotational, translational, and reflectional symmetry!
(For those deprived of such wonderful experiences, rotating "M" and making a "W" is very common in textbook problems, and, well, I don't even have to start on Matt Cutts, do I?)
I'm wondering if BMW is actually at fault here, or if they were using a Search Engine Optimization company to try to boost their ranking, or at least employing the same techniques? Redirect pages to give different results based on whether its Google looking at your page or a user is certainly something that needs to be stopped, and drastic measures may be the only possible way to fix this problem (besides acquiring a huge range of IPs or having the Google Toolbar be more intrusive.)
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Sounds like he just hit a nerve with some bloggers.
Its the truth though, alot of times the more relevant/useful search results are buried underneath lots of blogs/splogs/etc. It gets more annoying when people use Google to further their political agendas, such as the case with Jew and Jewwatch.com and Failure for anti-Bushies.
Finally, as long as we're on the subject of cars: to the domestic car maker whose European domain had hidden text on the front: your 30 day removal was set to expire in two days, but the hidden text has been taken off the page, so I'm scheduling the domain for reinclusion now.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Oh, is this why Miserable Failure still goes to President Bush? I see they really have a guard on deceptive search methods there at google, but I wonder why their stock is tanking...
Slashdot should be delisted soon because there's a whole bunch of @#$#!! yapping going on that doesn't make any sense at all to a search engine or human being, and I for one take responsibility and admit I enjoy it.
maybe they could have lowered it's rating, but remove it?
They did simply lower it. They reset its page rank to zero, so it shows up at the bottom of any results, or amongst all the other zero page rank results.
But as far as search engines go, a listing at the end is just the same as not being listed at all. In any case they did just as you said, they lowered its ranking. The summary I guess is technically incorrect, but practically acurate.
Try googling for: "german BMW de"
www.BMW.com comes up as #4 or so... kinda freaky.
Makes you wonder if there will ever bea "common carrier" law for search engines.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I really like Google, their philosophy, and their ethics.
I really and truly dislike deception. Its very common, especially when money is involved for some reason.
To me, I look at "work" simply. Work is getting paid for doing things for people that they appreciate. The more unique or the more quality or quantity of things that you bring to people, the more money you will get.
Much of advertising is deceptive. 99.999% of SPAM is completely deceptive. And personally, it really irritates me. Don't get me started about the snail mail I get with things like "Check enclosed". Grrrr.
At least here in the US, BMW is a very desired car. Many consider it a status symbol. Their slogan here is "The Ultimate Driving Machine". I don't know what their status is in Germany.
Good for Google, bad for BMW. TFA says that Ricoh might be next for delisting. One thing I wish Google would do is get Froogle out of beta, and separate the search results for buying things and having information about things. Believe it or not, when I do a search for a digital camera or some other product, I may want to learn something about the product before I buy it. And yes, I do use Google for searching for something to buy. I've found $2-3 parts to fix things that I simply could not have found at a local store.
How do they reconcile this with their FAQ which states:
"The order and contents of Google search results are completely automated. No one hand picks a particular result for a given search query, nor does Google ever insert jokes or send messages by changing the order of results."
Sorry bud, you're looking for DMOZ, not Google. DMOZ employs a whole buncha editors to assess sites for quality, content and relevance. That isn't Google's game.
"People do it better."
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
It is, however, an occasion to look at the growing power of Google (and remember, perhaps, that such a large amount of power in the hands of one company can be dangerous, regardless of intent).
I don't think we have too much to worry about. The power Google has in this is because it is the most popular search engine. As soon as they start abusing the power and delisting major sites, then there will certainly be another search engine that will take its place. So it is in its best interest to behave well.
The bottom line is that Google wants to be the best search engine it can be. It doesn't do that by not indexing mass amounts of companies. It also doesn't do it by alowing webmasters to get themselves at the top of the results just because of some tricks. So it must walk a fine line. In fact its best bet is to delist one or two high profile companies and make a big deal about it, so that it discourages other companies from following them.
I like your stance. If I had mod points you'd get one.
Are they going to do something about the rips from Wikipedia that I often encounter when I run a Google search? There nothing like searching for something (usually fairly obscure), and coming up with (a) a Wikipedia article, and (b) the same Wikipedia article on a dozen other sites with domain names that don't have any fscking thing to do with Wikipedia.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Quite. And why don't I hear anyone making the argument "But BMW are just acting to maximise the profits of their shareholders, as they are required to do by law" that I have heard so often recently in Google's favour?
Ethics will fall by the wayside, and might will be right; keep your eye on Google.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
What I don't understand is why Google is going out of their way to punish BMW for using SEO strategies to up their pagerank instead of chasing all the other junk (porn, pharmaceuticals, etc. websites that do the same with far more malicious intent. In fact, it could almost be said that legitimate companies such as BMW *have* to engage in this type of behavior just to keep themselves above the noise.
I'd really rather that Google spend some time tuning their engine to eliminate all the trash it's accumulated rather than making big headlines punishing organizations that are relatively decent Internet citizens. And on the off chance that Google is trying to 'make an example' by punishing a big company like BMW, someone there needs to be hit with the clue hammer; no disrespectable SEO slinger is going to pay attention to that sort of thing.
In related news, after being de-listed, the headquarters of BMW Germany ceased to exist. People coming to visit the headquarters found only a vast, dark vortex of nothingness, over which were visible huge glowing letters reading "Error 404: Page Not Found". The entire German management of BMW has disappeared as well, along with several nearby dairy farms and a brewery.
At a press conference, a reporter asked whether this sort of behavior fit with the company's "Do no evil" motto, or reflected a growing arrogance and malice on the part of Google. The Google spokesman declined to respond to the question. Instead his eyes briefly glowed red before the reporter spontaneously burst into flames and was consumed, leaving only a small pile of ashes on the floor.
The remaining reporters had no further questions.
Can someone put in simple terms how this "improper boosting" is done? What is the proper way to get boosted?
Resetting the page-rank to zero is fair and non-permanent. Simply put bmw.de will regain a legitimate page-rank in the future, but for now this is the short term consequence of using keyword treatment to your website. (Note the bmw.de website would display paragraphs of motoring related keywords when javascript was turned off, this tactic overtime artificially boosts your page rank. It is easy to reproduce, however it is not an invisible action and is against most search sites terms.)
"such a large amount of power in the hands of one company can be dangerous, regardless of intent"
The thing is, any power Google has is entirely derived from its goodwill, and the willingness of people to use it. I can stop using Google at any time, start using another search engine, and their power over me vanishes. Altavista used to be the king of search engines, look where they are now. It could just as easily be Google in the drainage ditch next to it in a few years. Google's made enough money that they can probably survive if they start doing too much evil (because they are doing evil, just not enough for most people to stop using them) and people move to something else. Nothing other than the will of someone to do it stops someone from creating a competitor to Google, and if it does its job better, it takes half a second for me to switch, no hassle. It's not like switching between Windows and Linux, where you need to repartition hard drives, format, look for new software to replace the old stuff, etc. To replace where I search, I just add a new address to my browser's search engines listing, make that the default, and I'm switched. End of story.
No one makes the argument because BMW is taking advantage of another company, Google, at Google's expense. BMW gains more hits on their web site b/c their PageRank is higher, and Google suffers because word of abuse like this reduces the quality of their searches and the repuration of their search engine. Therefore, to protect their own interests, Google shut down the offender. Both companies were working to maximize the profits of their shareholders, but one was trying to take an action counter to the other's interests, and so the other (Google) responded.
They did simply lower it. They reset its page rank to zero, so it shows up at the bottom of any results, or amongst all the other zero page rank results.
.com site.
Nope, it's really, really gone. Instead of seeing the global site, you can only see the
Actually, from what I understand, they weren't spamming at all. What they were doing was using 'doorway' pages, which serve up different content to the googlebot than to human visitors. My understanding is that bmw's DE site wasn't very search engine friendly, and so they used doorway pages to "optimize" their results.
While this is against the googles terms of service, I can see how someone might think this was a perfectly valid way of countering the fact that google wasn't indexing their site well.
This brings up some thorny issues in my mind. Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank. In effect, google is dictating the terms upon which the entire web must operate, or get a 'death penalty', either because your site doesn't match what google is looking for (and thus gets a low rank) or because you gave google what they were looking for, but it violated their terms of service.
This seems inherantly "evil" to me.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
"If google nuked the pagerank of someone who isn't intentionally spamming, like slashdot, we'd all have a right to be screaming bloody murder. But this makes perfect sense."
If that happened, a Google employee would not mention it on his personal blog, now would he.
No longer is it about organizing information, it's whether or not they want you listed.
Their track record says otherwise. In 2004, they came under fire for not removing an anti-semitic website, jewwatch.com, which was coming up as the first hit when searching for "jew". Even today, it is second only to Wikipedia.
Their argument at the time was that they were not going to block sites from their index based on content. According to that site that I linked, it was blocked in countries where the content of the site was illegal.
It looks to me like they will not block based on (legal) content, but will block people who fsck with PageRanks.
I do not think that removing a website from google is a god idea. It goes directly against their goal of organizing the worlds information. Many people depend on google to get information, this denies them some of that(very little now, but many websites use SEO). A better move would have been to lower the page-rank of the websites that linked to it, and to decrease the score that the BMW website has, a lot. I have been happy with the way Google has ignored interfering with the algorithms that they use to organize the information on the internet. I considered them to be unbiased, that way the results are what I want to see instead of what google wants me to see. Google has seemed very commited to not tampering with things like this. Gearge Bush's biography is the top result for miserable and failure, and an anti-Semetic website is the top result for the word Jew. They've refused to change either of those results. I have felt safe because the 800-pound gorrila that google is has not been throwing it's weight around. Off-topic: According to Bill Gates, google is working on a hamburger making robot. I love hamburgers, but am to lazy to make them. Also, google employees read Google-slashdot, but I have yet to see them post.
...BMW drivers all over Palo Alto are somehow locked out of their cars, coincidentally affecting some Google employees. No word yet on if this affects all cars globally, or if this is a localized problem.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Google search results directly affect business, and on a frighteningly large scale. Who's to say whether a site's HTML is "deceptive"? It's a subjective decision, and one that presents a conflict of interest to Google.
If Google's ranking system can be fooled by hidden text, is that BMW's fault? I say it should be up to Google to come up with accurate ranks, NOT reset any site that doesn't jive with their system
I Googled BMW Germany. I got BMW.com. BMW.de was nowhere in sight. So, yes, they really did it.
Can BMW sue Google for restraint of trade? I have no idea. If a map maker deliberately omits the street on which my business is located, I think I have cause for an action. If the mapmaker claims that they did it because I defaced a street sign, I still think I have cause for action. People have a right to expect maps to be accurate.
Google purports to find information on the web. They aren't a directory where you have to pay to be listed. It doesn't matter that they offer their service for free. If they post misleading information or omit information that people should expect to be there, they could be in trouble.
Hmmmm.. not entirely sure how the page ranking works.. Go to google and enter "site:bmw.de" and you will get 0 results at the moment.
Wouldn't people (apart from Germans, or those that speak German) go to bmw.com anyway?
For more obscure sites, this is a harsher punishment, for major corporations who base web wite is obvious, it doesn't really make much of a difference (the children at BMW in this case deserved to have their hands smacked, it was after all a pretty silly and pointless thing for them to do).
In many ways a perfect example of Google's publicy declared control system working in practice and just a bit of a warning to smaller companies where this kind of behaviour would have a significant affect. Google preserving the rights of the many for a quality search service against the greed of a few, in my book that fits pretty well with "do no evil".
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
No, they weren't spamming. They were presenting different content to search engines than they were to users, a problem search engines have been dealing with for a long time. I've heard it called spider food, etc.
This technique can be beneficial, allowing a page to present easily indexed versions of a page for the search engine devoid of Flash, etc. It can also be abused, presenting on topic info to Google or other engines and Porn, phish, etc to users who land there. Obviously Google thought they were being abusive, contacted them and warned them they would be delisted, and they chose to ignore the warning.
Personally I'm all for slapping down webmasters who do this, but lets not call it spamming, since it occurs entirely on the host site. I can't recall the industry term for this, unfortunately, and since the search engine players are notoriously non-communicative, I'm not even sure our terminology is the same as others.
Google comes up with the PageRank system, basically counting the number of links to a particular page from all the other pages on the Internet, and they are shocked (shocked!) to find that the system is being abused.
From Google's Technology Page: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value.
Democratic? Call this Troll-bait, but how is the Internet democratic? I get a million friends to put a link to some worthless page on all our sites and suddenly the PageRank for that site jumps. And how democratic is it when Google "decides" that someone has violated the spirit of the system and shuts them out? More like autocratic.
Frankly Google is hoist upon its own petard for this one -- you can't come up with some system and then be scandalized to find that people are going to try and abuse it. Insurance companies, public aid programs, and computer voting companies could tell you that!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
How do you know that Google will always do this for reasons you agree with? Remember the flap over Google cooperating with China's censorship?
In related news, after being de-listed, the headquarters of BMW Germany ceased to exist. People coming to visit the headquarters found only a vast, dark vortex of nothingness, over which were visible huge glowing letters reading "Error 404: Page Not Found". The entire German management of BMW has disappeared as well, along with several nearby dairy farms and a brewery.
... and apparently, it was perpetrated with the help of Google Earth.
"This brings up some thorny issues in my mind. Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank."
Bollocks. If you design your web site in such a way to properly and openly reflect your business or whatever, no problems. If you attempt to defraud or otherwise screw search engine results then google (and hopefully other search engines) has every right to get shitty. From a consumer perspective I want my google results to best reflect what I am looking for. If google has to delist fraudulent web sites to improve my search results, then they are just doing a good job.
I just tried looking up stuff from bmw.de. I got nada from Google.
Bad move Google.
Better move:
In "advanced search" have several options for "cheating" web sites:
1a) mark with black flag, useful to help boycotters
1b) do not mark
2a) filter out
2b) move to bottom of ranking
2c) filter out all but - very useful for boycotters
2d) do not adjust rankings
The default should be either 1a with 2b.
In the future, further refine the searches by types of evil - if I want to find every web site engaging in a certain type of cheating, Google should make it easy to do so.
Google's new motto should be:
"We don't do evil, but we do help you find it."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The lost souls if the employees of BMW Germany, floating around aimlessly in vacuum, now put their last hope to the Wayback Machine.
In no way is Google telling you how to design your web site. What they are saying is that they have a requirement of what google will index. They want to know that the pages that are indexed by them are what the site will show you. IOW, Google is saying that they want to be fair to their customers (you and me). This is part of their clause (do not be evil). But some sites are run by idiots and will look at how they can cheat the search engines. They want high rankings in some areas, without really having it. That is what porn sites do. They try to have links to themselves for things such as Linux, Microsoft, etc, but the site has NOTHING to do with these. That is cheating, and that is what BWM was doing.
Evil? Off hand, I would say that Google is STILL the top
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So, Google delisted bmw.de for doing something that "Search Engine Optimizers" call SE cloaking or SE stealth. This is where you show the search engine crawler one keyword-loaded thing, but then show the normal user another thing; usually this is done by looking at the HTTP_User_Agent server-side, but in this case bmw.de was doing it with client-side javascript redirects.
IMO, they and many others deserve to be delisted for attempting to game the system. The only SE tactic more disgusting is spamming blogs for free pagerank boosts.
The best legit means to increase your rank is simply to have quality content that people WANT to link to, and which is intelligently marked up (e.g. use header tags for important stuff; not sliced up images that semantically mean nothing).
Power to the Peaceful
that's fine, google flexed its muscle, and the people will flex theirs with massive SELLS across the board.
...epecially if they are KNOWN employees of Google (they'd be kinda easy to pay off, no?).
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
When are they going to de-list Gamasutra for doing the same thing? Search engines get to see their articles, but they use a javascript redirect to send real browsers to the sign-in/registration page.
They're still not doing anything non-automated. Each page in their index has a page rank. They changed the page rank of one particular page. The algorithm still does what it is supposed to do. No "one hand" involved. No joke, no message.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
yes .. the "dont do things that might decrease google's profits" law ..
Were this action by google untainted by 'self-interest' , then maybe it has a point ..
And while they're about it, why NOT punish the 2billion of us who might have need to have BMW come up fast? I mean, we're only peons in google's game of world domination!
Did anyone see any ref ANYWHERE to any requirement that any site not use any materials at hand to 'up' their search standing?? ive never seen such a thing!
and who would MAKE such a rule? Google 's job is to search and report what it finds, not to act as the earth's police!
Ive communicated with google on other matters, to find it totally disregarding legitimate user-privacy concerns. So who polices google itself??
Time to trim this monster before its out of control ..or is it already?
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
You can remember when google indexed the web just like it was.
Now they just publish "Google Information for Webmasters" and delist anyone who doesn't abide by their guidelines. The times they are a changing.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
It is their search engine. Nobody owns their search engine except for Google Inc.
Now people have manipulated Google so that their sites are favored above others. Everyone knows that when you search for "The worst President Ever" on Google you find George Bush's biography. I've never thought of it as immoral, but silly. Google does have a right to protect their search engine and keep it producing the fast and accurate results. When one manipulates Google, they damage Google's reputation. If Google does nothing, it is fair to say they don't have a reliable search engine when it's manipulated, but if they do fix the problem, it's fair to say they are a reliable search engine.
another search to try are "French Military Victories" (click on "I'm Feeling Lucky")
If ethics fall by the wayside, don't you think consumers will respond by progressively rejecting Google as a search engine?
The entire German management of BMW has disappeared as well, along with several nearby dairy farms and a brewery.
Good Lord, no! Not the brewery!
>Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank.
You know its "Google rank" as in Google determines the ranking of the page.
>In effect, google is dictating the terms upon which the entire web must operate
Its the users who still determine how the web operates. "We" determined Google is a good search engine and use it. Its quite easy to stop using Google if it starts giving bad information. "I'm looking for BMW in Germany, but Google sucks for that, I'm moving on to another search engine." Before Google there was another most popular search engine (Yahoo? Alta Vista? some Inktomi based site?) and it could easily change again.
I'm all for bashing Google, but its Google's ranking, its their choice.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Google isn't the only search engine. If you'd rather use a search engine that turns a blind eye to abuse and constantly have your results filled with false positives, be my guest.
I for one hope all the search engines take aggressive steps to curb and suppress the effectiveness of artificial hacks to improve results. If spamming isn't rewarding for the companies, maybe they'll learn to spend their resources on improving things like page readability, content and functionality instead.
Why do people even bother to call it "SEO" instead of "spam"?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I've been working for a web design company, and we've been doing alternative content on pages for a long time. Not an SEO optimizations, but more like using FlashObject for Flash , sIFR for headers and a few other "change h1 tag contents to image" OR "welcome to our website, you're seeing this text because you don't have css enabled' tricks.
Does anyone know how google treats alternative content? I mean - I'm happy that I'm listed in google, but since some flash alernatives tend to be descriptive (especially for product preentations) I'm not sure what google people think about that.
Thanks for help.
--
Spieprzaj dziadu!
What were the exact keywords this web site was trying to manipulate?
If it was simply "BMW Germany" then the whole deal is stupid as they would probably rank number 1 or 2 anyway. In the worst case number 1 perhaps being a high profile German retailer. If it was just BMW, then I don't see the point why the mother company would have such a big interest in surpassing a more popular BMW site, say BMW US. Obviously the US market is much larger and its language more accesible than the german one, and letting it ranking first is most likely good for the business.
On the other hand, if they were google bombing words like: "most reliable", car, "best car", safest, fastest, coolest whatever, then those mofos did deserve to be ranked down to google oblivion.
In effect, google is dictating the terms upon which the entire web must operate...
I disagree. Does Google dominate the search market? Yes. However, I don't recall them ever using anti-competitive techniques to get there, unlike a certain Redmond-based corporation that we all love to hate. The difference here is that Google is at the top because customers like their services, not because the competition was intentionally squashed. I agree that Google needs to use a lot more discretion in the way it operates certain aspects, but I think claiming that the company is "dictating the terms upon which the entire web must operate" is a bit over the top.
Just because it can't be explained doesn't mean it isn't true. Science fits into reality... not the other way around.
OMG! Thanks to /.. everybody here tried googling for "BMW germany", and then not satisfied, went to bmw.de, and now the pagerank is back to where it was a week back!
There's a few comments which talk about Google stripping the PR like that's the punishment.
s you will see pretty quickly that the PR between results can vary greatly. You are quite likely to see lower-PR pages (or no PR pages) returned in the top 20 results, ahead of higher ones.
The punishment is not the stripping of PR, but being delisted. There are no bmw.de pages in Google. The URL is not in Google.
PR is calculated by an algorithm. It has been reset to 0, but that is because the site has been DE-LISTED. It is 0 now, because the URL is not in Google.
When the site qualifies for reinclusion the site's PR will return to it's normal value. It is calculated by an algorithm on a computer, not a pen, paper and opinion.
Now, the relevance of PageRank.
PageRank is one of many deciding factors used to sort search results by relevancy. It is far from the only one, and if you use something like http://www.seochat.com/?tool=7&option=com_seotool
For instance, porn:
5 - 5 - 5 - 6 - 5 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 7 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 0 - 0 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 0
If PR was truly a critical factor, there would not be 3 pages with PR0 in the first 20 results, and PR5's would not dominate the results.
I'm disappointed that after 10 years Google can't write a spider that DOESN'T identify itself as GoogleBot and confirms that pages match what the spider sees. How hard could it possibly be to setup a few more spiders' whose sole job is to follow the real Googlebots and misidentify their UA to confirm what's been indexed?
Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank.
Um, duh.
If you want to be indexed well, you have to make the site friendly to indexers. You are _always_ limited in your design by the pesky, inconvenient issue of people (and search engines) actually wanting access to your content. You're free to make a site that is difficult to navigate, or that search engine bots can't get easy access to, but don't go bitching about your lousy pagerank, low visit count or high user dissatisfaction afterwards.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"While this is against the googles terms of service, I can see how someone might think this was a perfectly valid way of countering the fact that google wasn't indexing their site well."
Google has some very specific rules on web pages if you want to get indexed. So, if you want to get indexed by Google; then follow the rules. Google doesn't tell people how to design pages; however, if you want to get indexed; then follow the rules.
Damn.. beat me to it. :P
DMOZ is good, however some of the editors have their own agenda.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No, it is because google is a very smart search engine.
Fight Spammers!
As a web site designer, at least for my own sites, I've been (briefly) tempted to post vast quantities of honey-pot data that is guaranteed to be "attractive" to search engines but which I am not (by copyright) allowed to have online. The idea of showing the googlebot the honeypot data and the rest of the world redirects to the legitimate owner of the information is offensive to the spirit of the web and is clearly an abuse. That, and the fact that I'm sure the Google system could spot it fairly quickly with a random spot check bot using headers that identify it as a user with a regular browser, are why I didn't and don't do it.
Does the fact that BMW is...well....BMW make it less abusive or less offensive to do misleading or abusive things to raise its site value?
Aside from all that, its fairly stupid in this case. People looking for BMW know what they're looking for, and BMW doesn't need tricks to raise brand awareness.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
And why don't I hear anyone making the argument "But BMW are just acting to maximise the profits of their shareholders, as they are required to do by law" that I have heard so often recently in Google's favour?
Trying to circumvent Google's rules for indexing sites and getting delisted as a result does not strike me as contributing hugely to BMW:s profits; quite the opposite, in fact.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
That's nowhere said AFAIKS.
Yeah, what they did wasn't good.
But what they have done is cover up the failures of their search engine. The internet is full of websites that suck, their search engine should be able to determine which one is the best with the search text. This delisting is heavy handed and does nothing to improve the service.
Why not FIRST communicate with the webmaster?
Why not see that it has a bunch of junk files and it's relevancy would be lower?
It's not just with their internet search, their email, adsense, etc are treated with a very very heavy hand. Are you going to wait when google is going to say that sending out more than 50 emails a day has to be spam and have your account banned? or have over zealous people click on your adsense advertisements to get the website AND webmaster banned?
Do a search on google for bmw and germany. bmw.de (a bmw owned website) is nowhere there. That means that google is doing a poor job with searching.
by the way, google removed that whole silly "do not be evil" clause.
This brings up some thorny issues in my mind. Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank.
I agree. Google has become an essential part of the Internet infrastructure, so punishing a web site like that is scary. Let's be serious here - when I am searching for "BMW germany", I want to find bmw.de, so what Google did almost seems like an arbitrary abuse of power.
Of course it is Google's right to do whetever they want with their search engine, and in theory competition should even things out, but we all know that things don't quite work out that way in practice. Nobody, including me, is going to start using MSN search because of this incident :-)
What if I wanted to implement my web site exclusively using AJAX ? (It doesn't matter whether it is a good idea, but let's say it is my choice, not Google's). I would have to serve static pages, different from what my users see, to search engines if I wanted my site to be indexed. How can Google decide whether this is good or bad ?
They may be able to misuse their power, that's for sure. But in this case they were totally on the spot. BWM was cheating. They were serving a different page for the spider to index than they were serving for the regular users.
Google just had to do it. Think about it. Think if you have one version of the Web for Google to index, and other one for people to read. That's cheating and can't be tolerated.
This brings up some thorny issues in my mind. Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank.
And this differs from any other search engine index since the dawn of time how? Any search engine uses some kind of ranking algorithm. It used to be that stuffing keywords in page titles affected it. That was a bad idea.
Google, like any other search engine has a primary customer to keep happy: me. I use their search engine to find useful data. Google does a much better job at solving *my* problems than any of their competitors. Great. I don't care even a little tiny bit about whether or not BMW is irritated about the fact that they hired some slimy SEO bastards and got smacked for it. Google is continuing to deliver useful content to *me*. If Google does a bad job of that, I'll use another search engine...but you know what? Google is still lightyears ahead of the competition. They *still* have a lighter-weight interface than the competition (which apparently still hasn't figured out that portals are not a replacement for search engines). They still do a good job of getting useful data, despite being the Big Dog that all the search engine spammers are gunning for.
More power to Google -- for making *my* life better.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
As soon as they start abusing the power and delisting major sites ...
not that this particular action is abuse. unfortunately abuse has worse outcomes when used over "non-major" sites/competitors. that actually is worst form of abuse. it's not easy to hurt major sites, since they are already major, but such abuse could potentially hurt non major sites bigtime, it WILL be too long before anyone notices.
sarchasm
Anyone else wonder what'd happen if Google was delisted from Google?
I wish users of Google would stop to punish Google for aiding in the unethical behaviour of censoring the Chinese people's access to the internet.
What is the first thing we learn from literature and history? Power corrupts.
Then turn off Javascript yourself and enjoy.
I was one of these sites. I ran a comics site that did not spam or have any 'doorway' pages. However, Google's code decided it was not fit for their search and "delisted" it. I contacted their support and even personally talked to employees that I knew, but no luck getting the site listed again. It's now been over 7 months. Since then I've moved on to other sites.
The moral of the story is: If Google doesn't like you, you're done. Pack up your things and go home.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I, for one, applaud Google.
The problem with BMW or other companies pushing their ranking to that degree is that when we end up with numerous bad results. Have you noticed that over the last couple of months, that you've had to dig deeper into search results?
In order for Google to improve, they will have to keep tuning their ranking and find enforcement methods.
I wonder how BMW cheated in search result and how google find it out? By robot-clicking, redirecting page or etc.
True. Saying Google is wrong in this matter is like saying Wikipedia is wrong when they ban vandels. You misuse a free and pseudo-public service and you get banned from using it. This is the definition of "the punishment fitting the crime", not a sign of Google being a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Read the article, also extra information here0 74113688.html?from=top5
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/02/06/1139
It appears the BMW site was also referencing 'used cars' as well as new cars, and redirecting to their own site.
Sounds dodgy to me.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
That's like if Microsoft decided to cut off sales of Windows SDKs to an application software vendor who it decided didn't play by the rules... but of course, they're free to develop desktop applications for other operating systems.
I'm amazed by the hordes of people who like Google-bashing. Nope. Microsoft has constructed a high barrier to entry in their market. You have to overcome application compatibility, user retraining, and lack of Microsoft applications (which means your business documents aren't necessarily compatible).
Google is a search engine. Going to Google is going to a website. If they get even slightly less good than someone else, users can easily go elsewhere -- as evidenced by how quickly Google took over from Yahoo and Altavista.
Google isn't shafting users here. They are working to provide incentive *not* to hire search engine spammers and keep information useful. If the alternative is letting me get shafted by search engine spammers, Google is doing the right thing.
If they provide a clear set of rules, spammers will work up to the very edge of them. If they simply let people know that severe, repeated abuse will result in a penalization in their own database, they reduce spam in their database. I'm all for this move.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
There's a huge difference here. What BMW did was to cheat; they served a special purpose page for the Google bot to index, one that was totally different than the one served to the user. So the page was indexed using information that was not the same that a normal user would find. That's totally unacceptable. And that's Google's business, so they had to take action - they were the ones being cheated (and in turn, cheating their end users). As for the Wikipedia ripoffs, the situation is different. First, because the Wikipedia license explicitly allows for that. Second, because the ripoffs are just serving content that they rightly can serve, Google has no option but to index them. Now, perhaps some of the Wikipedia ripoffs are using questionable SEO techniques to get there in front of the original Wikipedia site. I don't know. If they are, they need to be purged out of Google listings too. But bear in mind that the Internet is an awfully big place to be, and not even some company as big and powerful as Google stands a chance at checking every page that comes to the index for cheating. Even when their systems catch something suspect, they still have to check it manually, and that takes time, and expensive expert human work hours to do.
Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank
huh? how about just creating a relevant site? my website is listed first with NO PROMOTION on my behalf on sensible search terms. "anonymous killer" as a search term brings up my site first. heck, i registered my site with go daddy just a few weeks ago and didn't even get it completely finished until a few days ago.
did google, yahoo, etc dictate my choices? NO! just a few minutes to think about what i needed and how to proceed got me listed first. if a one man shop can be this successful why cann't a multinational corporation?
--iggy_mon - www.ananonymouskiller.com - Die Trying -
One key problem with the indexing and page rank scheme is that Google is Flash blind. I have spent a great deal of time trying to deal with the problem of Google getting to flash driven sites and found that the only way is to create content that allows Google to index a higher percentage of the site. In many cases I had to do this as a function of a php script running nightly to capture content and create an 'index' of my own just so Google could keep up. Is this then a violation (if I understand the article correctly)?
Personally, I believe how you are Google ranked seems unfair since it's based on what other individuals and organizations are thought of and therefore think of you. Let's face it, it's a socially popular methodology and those who are in, well they will remain in, and those who are not have a more difficult time getting into the main stream. Of course you could skip all that by jumping on Google add scheme couldn't you? What we have here is a digital disparity, in my opinion.
Greetings and Salutations...
I see this as the natural extension of the artificial limitations that Google puts on its search results. There are two problems I have with the current algorithms used:
1) I do not think that the "page rank" system as a manditory method
of accessing the indexed pages is a good or helpful thing. My understanding
is that the Google Rank is calculated based on the number of pages that point AT a given page. The higher this number of references, the higher the rank.
As a long-time researcher, I feel that this is unwise, as I have rarely found
treasure on well-trodden pathes. Rather, it is the ignored backwater that
often has the true gem hidden in it.
If the page rank was OPTIONAL, I would not have a problem with it. However, it is not, therefore the chance one has of finding the buried treasure
pretty much goes to zero.
2) Also, no matter what one does, one CANNOT see more than the first
1000 results of a search. This is an arbitrary and (IMHO) unnecessary limit
that, combined with the ranking system, ensures that MOST of the web pages
dealing with a given subject will NEVER BE SEEN by folks searching Google.
I would be happy to accept the page ranking system if the programmers would
remove this (admittedly) artificial limit.
I could go on, of course, but, suffice it to say that my feeling is that
Google is evolving away from the true indexing tool it started out as, and
into a controller of information. No matter how benign that control may be,
it is not a service to the consumers, but, is a great boon to Google's bottom
line. Their evolution has been especially obvious with their deal with
China. While it makes great business sense to follow the course of censorship
and information control that they have, it smacks of hypocracy for Google's
management to claim that they are following the path of idealism and openness
that they started on years ago.
Regards
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
It makes perfect sense. PowerBooks are PowerPC-based; MacBook Pro are Pentium Pro-based. ;-)
http://outcampaign.org/
Last time I checked, Ricoh is no longer in the camera business. Much like Konica-Minolta, they decided that it wasn't profitable and are sticking with copiers and the like.
This was a very clear case; the search engines were shown a text-intensive page, ordinary browsers were bounced to a completely different page with lots of images.
They were spamming, they broke the rules google set, bammo, pagerank=0. They're still listed on Yahoo (and other search engines).
How about selective enforcement then? Just how many sites get "de-listed"? Who and how do these sites get chosen? Is it only the "big boys", the ones that garner the press? How about those who advertise heavily, would Google take just as heavy handed approach with them?
What I think is most screwed is that Google is reacting to the fact that their pagerank sucks. It is far too easy to exploit. So now instead of fixing their screwed up (and well known) pagerank system, they are going to run around and use the fact that they have a superior position to have other people bow to their will. If this were M$ pulling the same crap, everyone would be up in arms.
It appears the BMW site was also referencing 'used cars' as well as new cars, and redirecting to their own site.
Sounds dodgy to me.
Dodgy? Chrysler was doing this too?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
If you're after bmw in Germany generally you'll either type in bmw.de or bmw.com and look for the international link. This doesn't affect people who are after bmw so much as it affects bmw's hits when people search for "luxury motor car" or "vehicle" or other terms that will now spit out a heap of other brands before bmw.com. Additionally articles from BMW are going to be pretty far down the list so people will see more third party information than first hand biased as hell BMW articles. Google isn't essential. They perform an essential service (page indexing, providing search functinalities) however there are many other providers that would love to step up to the plate if google left a gap. If you want to use AJAX to do your whole site then only one page is indexable, as only one page can be directly linked. AJAX is not an index friendly technology, that has nothing to do with Googles preferences
Keep in mind that when someone breaks the rules, they don't generally act with the expectation that they will be caught. They tend to bank on the hope that they will get away with it. This time they got screwed, but that doesn't change the reasoning behind their intentions.
Gamasutra is not alone in doing that. Also, it makes perfect sense if you consider that the purpose of a search engine is to help people find the content they want. Gamasutra has to serve up the content to Googlebot or it won't be indexed and people won't find it.
Besides, registration at Gamasutra is free and no strings are attached. Use a fake name and address (or use bugmenot) if it really bothers you.
You moderators are cowardly. Are you even capable of forming a logical rebuttal to anything I have said? Thought not.
Prove me wrong.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/bod/panke/defau lt.mspx
you big money spender. get bent ass munch.
I guess we'll just have to hope that Google will be always nice and always make the right choice, which they do make, don't they ... ?
This is slashdot. Get it?
Here you speak "english" as its spoken in US of A.
Take your "fancy" edinburgh english and st*ff it up!
As churchill would love to say today: "Keep it simple, dumb*ss"
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I'm not friend of Google, but I don't mind seeing them be the means of karmic payback to BMW. For too long, they have behaved as if the rules didn't apply to them, and they encourage their customers to do the same. A few close encounters with a BMW dealership, and tailgating jerks behind the wheel taught me this. It's good to see someone call them to account for their attitude.
Oh, and to any California BMW drivers reading this: Yes, the laws of physics apply to you, too!
I take it you're quoting the official response from BMW Germany's IT spokesperson.
Oh, I completely agree with that - what BMW did was, as you put it, "dodgy", not to mention unbecoming for such a high-profile company. Google's actions might very well be the best thing that could be done under these circumstances - the punishment is a bit harsh, but BMW on the other hand is not just some company, so the idea is they will fix their pages, Google will promptly restore BMW's pagerank and everybody will have learned a lesson.
What worries is me is a bit more general though:
bmw.com the international site for bmw is the first result.
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
It looks like ricoh.de is gone now as well...
> While this is against the googles terms of service, I can see how someone might think this was a perfectly valid way of countering the fact that google wasn't indexing their site well.
n ational-webspam/
The thing is that the "doorway pages" were stuffed full of german keyword terms like "used cars" and the content was repeated over and over again, with only the model names substituted.
It is garbage. If BMW didn't like the fact that pages didn't work as designed, they should have redesigned them, not presented a totally different set of content to the search engine bots.
Also, you seem to suggest that Google was at fault because it couldn't index the content properly, when, in fact, no search engine could index the site as is as it was designed.
Matt Cutts has a screen cap on his blog -
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-inter
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
"If you design your site in such a way..."
That's precisely my point. Google is dictating how you must design your site. No, you don't have to follow their standards, but if you don't, you get a low page rank and your competitor, who DOES follow googles rules gets ranked above you.
Your argument is strictly about fraudsters, but this was not a case of fraud from what I understand. It was simply a case of their site not being search engine friendly, and trying to improve their rank because they didn't design their site in such a way as to comply with googles commandments.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
*slaps thigh*
Ooooh, 3 digit UID. Better show some respect to the elderly.
Dodgy, some sort of Australian colloquialism (I just know that is misspelt).
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Google is saying that they want to be fair to their customers (you and me).
Their customers are advertisers. Their product is you and me.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
My nomination for the next site that google should delist is www.google.com !
:)
Sorry, no hyperlink is available at this time.
"Mentally confused and prone to wandering."
No, if it was it might read like this:
"Saugst ein Ei gehen du fettes Bumsen - Du bist 136 Kilogramm Schaumgummiringöl.",
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Google is a private company, and they can choose to be exclusive if they wish.
Sure, they run the world at the moment, but falls from grace can be quick. I still haven't been swayed from the position that it (google death penalty of BMW.de)was a 'good thing'.
Heck, it's even funny.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Google *IS* telling you how to design your web site. If you do this, and do that, and do this other thing, your ranking will be higher than if you don't do those things. So, two sites, with identical content, but one structurs it in the way that google wants, that one will get a higher page rank.
Now, if I want to design my site in such a way as to be friendly to my users (say, a flash based site... please, no comments about how friendly flash is.. lots of usres like it), but not friendly to google, why should a competitor with a crappier site get a higher rank? Just because they followed googles rules? That's bull.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Now, if only the Linux zealots could apply the same logic when talking about MS Windows. People might actually take Slashdot seriously.
I've had a German insult *me* out of the blue, and when I came back with an insult, he acted like he was some sort of victim. That's that good old German personality for you.
Google delists Chinese government for manipulating search results so as to put pro Chinese government "tiananmen square" results first. Oh wait, google already did that for them. Never mind. Do no evil.
Can someone explain to me why it's important that BMW is on Google anyway? Isn't it a no-brainer that www.bmw.com is the global BMW site, and www.bmw.de is the German BMW site? Do people really need a search engine to find this out? Soon, people are going to entirely replace DNS with Google.
Oh wait...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Who the HELL needs Google to find BMW's German webpage? If you cannot think of www.bmw.de you will at least get there if you can think of www.bmw.com. If you can think of neither, you're likely to be a complete web-noob in which case you are very likely not to have heard of Google in the first place.
Here's why this is not good.
What Google did isn't any different from what BMW did. How so? If BMW figured out how to go around page rank all Google needed to do is reverse the unfair advantage. Setting page rank to 0 is exerting Google's power to do so and it is not fair to people looking for high end cars.
But there's more.
Now that we know, that Google itself is messing with the page rank are you sure Google search returns unbiased results?
Do a Google search for "search engine" (no quotes).
Google isn't even on the first page.
Yahoo is, and Search Engine watch is link #1.
!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I wonder if anyone has any insight into why.
I think you misunderstand the argument. My argument is not that Google is or isn't doing anything illegal, but rather that they are, by virtue of their overpowering presence in the market (so much so that even Yahoo has given up trying to beat them, and the term "googling" has become synonymous with web searching) means that any rules they put in place that effect web sites page rank should be fair and not arbitrary.
Unfortunately, Google has taken the route that pure text sites that make heavy use of semantic tags get better ranks than, say, a flash based site. While there are technical reasons why this may be so (it's hard to index flash data), it's still a case of Google arbitrarily choosing one method over another.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Google, like any other search engine has a primary customer to keep happy: me
You are not Google's customer. Well, unless you're an advertiser.
Google doesn't tell people how to design pages
Except when they do.
I wasn't referring just to doorway pages. I was referring to how google prefers some kinds of content over others.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Would you say they have been "degoogled"?
Or "ungooglable"?
BMW is popular, i dont see why they would have needed to do something like that?
Except, of course, that the competition is starting to be driven out of business. Even Yahoo has decided they can't compete with Google. Microsoft seems to be the only company even trying anymore.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
It is a precedent. Imagine for example giving the police the right to arrest anybody they deem necessary and trust them to make correct judgement every time because they are good guys after all - I mean they are not just going to start arresting people at random, right ? If there is a power to be abused, it probably will be, sooner or later ...
Because a search engine in an open and competitive market determining how best to return results to its users is just like a police state.
Where's my option to choose a different police force if I don't like the one that wants to arrest me?
Oh, I agree with you that this is an inherant problem with search engines; the inability to index certain kinds of sites. My point is that google should not be "punishing" companies that choose to design their site a specific way, and then "cheat" to get around problems with search engine technology.
Google should be trying to solve the problems with indexing these kinds of content, not enforcing that sites follow a method they CAN index.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Google pulled their own help pages when news spread that they were using a similar technique to gain rank.
2 2
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/10/19342
liqbase
This is completely ridiculous. For the vast majority of legitimate web pages, this will change, affect absolutely nothing. For those few major websites that do break the terms of service, then there will be consequences. This is barely a slap on the wrist, BMW's site is still accessable, try this: Google Query: BMW. See, BMW's site is still acceptable from Deutschland. Now, quit whining.
Actually, Google is search result #8, right on the first page under Yahoo.
As for what would happen if Google delisted Google? My advice is to not go there. Contemplating such deep matters could very well cause spontaneous cerebral detonation.
This space unintentionally left blank.
I'm very sorry but that doesn't make any sense at all in german. Translated back it means something like: " Suck an egg you fat bumping - you are 136 kilo foam rubber oil "
*an infinite number of monkeys wrote this sig
Granted, my German is rather rusty, but checking what BMW Germany had done, I see one page full of graphics for people who have javascript, and one page full of text for people who don't browse with javascript. A picture is worth a thousand word (and even more bandwidth), so it's no wonder that the text page contains a lot more, um, text than the javascript-redirected one. /or/ Google's best interest? Or is it perhaps in the best interest of the paid sponsors who pop up at top when you enter searches like "luxury car" or "sports car"?
/must/ therefore tread very lightly not to end up in the same quagmire as Microsoft is now, and IBM and Bell have been before.
/very/ clearly. I'd hate to see a site get delisted because it has a lynx- and textreader-friendly home page with an alternative flashy and less context-rich page for graphical browsers, but this /can/ happen if the difference is not very clearly defined.
Of course, ICBW, and what's on that text page is pure gibberish full of keywords, but it looked to me to be a more comprehensive text version of a marketing page (and you can't fault them for having a marketing page). If so, what, if anything did Google do to warn IBM, and is the reaction really in the customer's
The problem as I see it is where Google draws the limits -- is this precisely defined, and can we trust Google to be as strict with its major advertisers as with the competitors of advertisers? Yes, Google is a business and must be allowed to set rules, but they are also in an oligopoly-situation, where they're the major player, and
"Do no evil" might have died once the investors took control, but "Do no stupid" should still be a good rule.
I'm not bashing Google here, but I think they need to be careful, and draw the lines
Regards,
--
*Art
May be this is what "google bombing"! But, when I want to visit the homepage of BMW Germany, as a result, Google fails to take to the place where I want. Secondly, it rises the questions that is a ""rule" like the one Google, a private company makes should be able to affect other companies so much in the internet sphere. Finally, it should be noted that Google is reminding us no one should not rely on it and a fresh call for necessity of competition in any industry - which would leave atleast me in not using Google all the time for the sake of neutrality of the web.
So its not OK to spam search terms, but if your Mazda and you give Google some cash, it ok to get your site listed when people google Pontiac.
l e-gm-mazda_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-01-30-goog
Huh.
How is taking some company that was abusing the system off of a web-site even remotely like arresting people?
The premise is different. The process is different. The consequences are different. The governing factors are different. I'd have a hard time coming up with something that is more unlike police abuse than this situation.
Google is a search engine. Other search engines exist. Using Google does not preclude one from searching on other search engines. Delisting a company from Google may suck for that company, but so what? It isn't like they're putting that company out of business - they're just no longer provind a *free* service to that company because they feel that the company didn't play by their rules.
If Google goes over the line - if they stop listing companies "just because," then people will eventually stop using them because they don't provide useful results. But also, if Google doesn't nuke sites that are breaking the rules, they won't provide useful results, and people will stop using them. It's a balancing act, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Honestly, it seems like everyone's scrambling to find some way to turn Google into the evil empire, another MSFT. Here's the thing - it can't happen because they aren't a monopoly, and they can't become a monopoly because the user investment is exactly zero and the barriers to switching to using another search engine are non-existent. If Google starts dicking people around, Google will see a quick response. With companies like MSFT - where users have to invest a substantial amount of money just to use the products - there's incentive not to switch, since you'd be throwing your "investment" away.
Do I like everything that Google does? Hell no. But I'm able to recognize that their business model is one that would make it very difficult for them to behave in anti-competitive ways withour fucking themselves badly in the process.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
"BMW's site is still accessable, try this: Google Query: BMW. See, BMW's site is still acceptable from Deutschland. Now, quit whining."
... In the first 250 (!) search results BMW.de still does not appear. I scrolled past BMW USA, BMW Canada.. even BMW korea! But no BMW.de.
Tell me, exactly where on that page do you see BMW.de?
I had some time to kill so I went through the results a bit
So, in the future, before you tell people to "stop whining", I suggest you make sure you aren't completely and utterly wrong.
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
In much the same way Microsoft doesn't tell OEMs how to configure their computers ?
Good Lord, no! Not the brewery!
In other news, Google's cafeteria options have recently expanded...
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
His original point is still valid. I am Google's user. Google is looking out for my interests. I don't care whether BMW gets screwed over in the process, and I'd *enjoy* seeing search engine spammers getting screwed over.
Google is thus continuing to make *my* life good. Which is why they remain the most used search engine.
Despite a long time of watching Google with a wary eye, the only honestly bad thing about Google that I can think of is that they retain personally identifying search profile information beyond 30 days (whereas search.aol.com doesn't, and that only came up very recently).
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
hmm, maybe in the paid results? Nope, there aren't any...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Google is clearly just looking out for their users and simply protecting the integrity of their service. No one cares about cheaters except to keep them out of the game.
Google "sells" searches to me in exchange for my eyeball time. Which they then resell to advertisers.
You know what I mean.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
It is a precedent. Imagine for example giving the police the right to arrest anybody they deem necessary
Woah woah woah, Google isn't the government. This is more like a bar that kicks out unruly patrons. Google is a company, google's site is their own to do with as they please. They have a right to kick anyone out for any reason.
Sounds like fraud to me.
yeah right, and what are these 10 result pages I just got...?
You never catch me alive
I wonder how big of an advertiser BMW is on Google search results and whether they will advertise more on keywords because of this.
A power that is limited in the respect that the perpetrator can always re-emerge from some other hostname and manage to rise to search result #1, as it appears as happened here.
Because at the time of this posting, a search for "BMW Deutschland" yields as the top hit a bmwfs.de which immediately redirects to bmw.de (BMW Germany). So either they didn't get totally obliterated forever, or they managed to get back up there. (EG)
I drive a BMW, and absolutely love it, but bought back before BMW put their future into Microsoft's hands - like I would ever drive a car with Microsoft inside! Considering this, I am not at all surprised BMW would stoop to unethical business practices.
tcboo
Actually, this search reveals that bmw.de is not listed on Google, period, and that's definitely BMW's official site for Germany... Of course, they haven't de-listed bmw.com, which does link to their German language site.
I see absolutely no reason to blame Google in this instance. Redirecting certain users based on the client they are using to different content is directly against the spirit of the 'net... Redirecting to different data based on the users' client can be good for only a couple of things: 1) joke sites that tell IE users to switch to some other browser 2) intelligent redirecting to a page with mostly the same content, but formatted to be friendly to portable devices.
Pagerank whoring aside, I still think BMW's web designer was in the wrong--as if there could be any confusion about bmw.de in the first place, I'm sure there's a half bazillion German websites linking to that site, putting it at place #1 by default. I guess that it's just a matter of Google breaking their foot off in BMW's ass for being stupid.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Google is a company, not a government.
They provide a certain tool.
You have the right not to be arrested without evidence.
You do not have the right to be indexed in Google.
Google's search is owned privately by Google.
They can do whatever they hell they want with it.
They can deindex your site for no reason, randomly.
They can put popups, porn, balloons, anything on their website.
They can design their index any way they want.
They are not a public service.
They are not a common carrier.
BMW.de still exists.
Google is not and cannot censor them.
Same with any other site.
Being index on Google is a priveledge that Google decides to grant you.
If they decide, for any reason, not to index you, too bad for you.
Don't like it?
Don't use them.
If too many people don't like it, Google will go bankrupt.
That's the only measure that they need.
Google is not forcing you to do anything. They ARE giving you advice on how to get the best search results, and they ARE willing to punish violators whose shitty tactics reduce the value that Google provides, thus harming Google's reputation. That's a good thing.
You are saying you should be allowed to abuse Google's site just to beat out your competition that doesn't abuse Google's site. That's bull.
Actually, you seem to be arguing as though you are a victim when you really may not be. The pages that you put up For Google's Eyes Only contain the same content that actual readers will see, right? If so, then it doesn't sound like Google would have a problem with your site.
But if you are trying to lure Linux users to your banana factory site, then you are a vile scum-sucking piece of recycled dog-vomit that needs to be blacklisted, not just de-listed.
Not that there's anything wrong with bananas, mind you. It's the deception that hurts.
It's one thing for a site not to "jive with their system". It's another for a site to be built to fool their system.
If you're gonna swim in a guys pool for free, he has every right to ask you to not pee in it. And kick you out if you do. Go find another pool.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
That's precisely my point. Google is dictating how you must design your site.
No they aren't. They are setting rules for how your site is ranked by their site. Violate the rules and your only penalty is a reset pagerank.
No, you don't have to follow their standards, but if you don't, you get a low page rank and your competitor, who DOES follow googles rules gets ranked above you.
Such is life. google hasn't got any obligation to make bmw's life easy.
It was simply a case of their site not being search engine friendly, and trying to improve their rank because they didn't design their site in such a way as to comply with googles commandments.
So they tweaked their site to improve their pagerank artifically? Sounds like a cut and dried case of google-bombing. If they actually improved their site design, none of this would have happened.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
No.
> Bollocks. If you design your web site in such a way to properly and openly
> reflect your business or whatever, no problems. If you attempt to defraud or
> otherwise screw search engine results then google (and hopefully other search
> engines) has every right to get shitty.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Go to http://www.adt.com/
It returns a splash page with a meta refresh redirect to http://www.adt.com/adt
About a week ago, it was a javascript redirect, with a little GIF that read "ADT"
ADT received a threat of delisting from Google, because they used a script for the redirect, and a meta description attribute containing legitimate information about their company.
Meta descriptions and keywords are pretty much ignored by search engines because porn sites abused them in the late 90's, but they were originally used to help directories and search engines. Yet Google refered to ADT's standard, proper use of the attributes as "hidden text", and grounds for unilateral punishment.
I foresee a consortium of rich companies financially backing an alternative to Google as Google continues to abuse their position.
Imagine that I have a business and I start prank calling my competitors to tie up their phone lines. Then the phone company disconnects my phone line for this abusing it. Is the phone company passing judgement?
Actually it isn't really as bad as that, bmw's website is still up. but you get what I'm saying, right?
Well, it sounds like you're using google differently to most users.
When I'm looking for something, I generally don't want the most obscure page, I generally want something on the trodden path, that other people have found usefull and linked to.
Your points are valid for your perspective, but I'd say the majority of google users do not share that perspective.
I'm not commenting on the China thing becuase I don't really know anything about that issue
biased much ? google is not telling you what colours to use on your website. They are not telling you what content you can or cannot put. However, they have simply chosen to act against you if you spam their engine and try and make it give twisted results. Next you will be arguing that spam-filters *force* you to design your e-mails in a particular way ? Which part of "DO NOT SPAM" are you unable to understand ?
Unfortunately, Google has taken the route that pure text sites that make heavy use of semantic tags get better ranks than, say, a flash based site. While there are technical reasons why this may be so (it's hard to index flash data), it's still a case of Google arbitrarily choosing one method over another.
That is their perogative. I fail to see why they should be obligated to do extra work for someone else's benefit. As an aside, I have a problem with flash sites - you can't bookmark individual pages. Instead, you have to bookmark the front page, then remember the path to whatever you want.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
so... is this where the bmw headquarters is?6 ,179.25087&spn=0.118835,0.4422&t=k
http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&hl=en&ll=66.26685
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
I certainly don't mind, in fact I expect a search for BMW or the name of any vehicle BMW makes to have BMW in the top 10 search results. Why else would I be searching for BMW? If I searched for something like, "problems with BMW vehicles," I'd expect sites that deal with problems to be some of the top.
Now if I search for cars, I would expect websites that have to do with cars, but perhaps not specific vendors of cars, unless they were appropriate to the search. I mean, information on what a car even is, and how they work, and what types of cars there are.
Ironically, I don't want those two to overlap. I know they are terribly related. I don't want Jim's BMW Trash Talk Site to be the top result for BMW. Just the same, I don't want BMW at the top of my search for cars.
Would the appropriate method have been for BMW to send off a friendly email to all the German websites that are results for the term BMW and ask that they use an actual link to the BMW site instead of just including the letters? Is this any different from manipulating results other ways? How different is it than if every instance of BMW on a German website were a link instead of just a term? Arguably, they should be links, shouldn't they? They make reference to a company and the reference should be a link, right?
Amen,
His argument is like saying the latest spam mail that got pasted my filter and my spot subject line check had to be designed that way so that it could get to the user.
It takes the position that the user WANTS to be marketed too, and that ANY method at all to have them be markted to by you is legitimate.
Well, if the user wouldnt want to be markted to you under "honest" conditions, then you shouldnt essentially attempt to get around those conditions.
This is the same with google, google is in the business of providing ME and other users like me with the BEST search results. If that means that under regular best practices you wouldnt even get in the top level, it isnt UP TO YOU AS A COMPANY to "help" the user find you by getting past the methods the user has in place to protect themselves. google is my tool of choice to protect myself from bad search results, and I want it to stay a usefull tool for that.
I dont want to go back to the old days were you could type "cartoon" and get search sites in the first 100 results all saying "cant find entry for cartoon, but you can try to buy cartoon at ebay using our referrer id" bullcrap.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
How can you admit that there is a valid technical reason for ranking one site better than another, and then refer to that result as arbitrary?
Look, there are a lot of tough decisions to be made when designing a website, but you can't just claim ignorance when it turns out you made a bad call. Using Flash, DHTML, or images in place of text all make sense in some situations, but you've gotta know going in that they stand a good chance of making your site less accessible, and weigh this cost against what you're gaining by using them.
I've not seen google delist sites that fake positive results. I suppose if BMW paid them there'd be no problem.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
The poor people that can't figure out that the BMW web site is www.bmw.com.
That's awfully elitist....
Very elitist, especially since the story summary indicates the site delisted was BMW.DE. I guess we add one name to the list of "poor people who can't figure out that the BMW web site is www.bmw.de".
I like music
"His original point is still valid. I am Google's user. Google is looking out for my interests. I don't care whether BMW gets screwed over in the process, and I'd *enjoy* seeing search engine spammers getting screwed over."
You are ONE of Google's users. Google is not looking out for your interest but THEIR interest. This is 800lb gorilla tactics. They're doing this in lieu of correcting their algorithms, their tactics, to save them time and money from implementing such measures, etc.
A company's results getting screwed over isn't in the best interest of *users*. What would be is correcting over-inflated page rankings to unaffected spam rankings. That would be playing nice; that would be playing fair; that would be representing the information accurately. Thing is Google won't or can't.
But as you say, you don't care if BMW or the like gets screwed over, even if that means screwing over accurate results the other way--to nothing. There is a difference between correction of information and a vendetta against all who play the system. I do not agree much with what BMW does, but I also do not agree with Google's actions as being anywhere "in the best interest of the user."
Babelfish, meet drownie. Drownie, this is babelfish. ;)
The PowerBook is dead. Get over it.
he's right and we know it.
My point was that a good system wouldn't be fooled so easily. Instead of punishing people for exposing its flaws, address the REAL issue and fix the system.
This may or may not have been a clear case. The issue I have with the punishment is that Google should defer such a financially damning decision to a neutral third party.
BMW spends millions designing, developing, maunfacturing, producing, and marketing a very good product. They throw in some scripts on their web site that Google thinks is naughty. So, I would guess, also, BMW does not spend a lot of money advertising on Google?
I'm not talking about spamming. I'm talking about sites having to conform to google's whims in order to appear anywhere near the top of a google search. I'm talking about legitimate sites, not even sites selling anything. Sites that simply choose to design their sites in one way or another can have their google rank turned to crap. Google now commands so much power that you are largely FORCED to appease google if you want your site to be discovered by anyone.
Yeah, i'm being overly melodramatic. But the point is clear, if you don't do what google wants, your rank suffers. THAT is power.
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The reason google should be obligated is because of the great power they wield. Much like Microsoft and other Monopolies have to work extra hard to play fair. I don't know if google could yet be classified as a monopoly, but i think they're damn close given that Yahoo has basically thrown in the towel to them.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I am a user that google claims to give the best results to, if flash based sites are not indexed, then google is failing us.
Now consider the top search terms and how well they were known prior to the internet. You see, you are too locked into the internet, BMW has a strong non-internet presensce (EBay, Mapquest and Google had none prior to the internet).
People will only get stuck if they are a little technophobic and have an expectation that the process is more complicated than it really is. So although they inherently know the solution, they will not choose it because they don't believe that their simple answer will work. So then they ask advice and if that is not possible they will find that the simple answer that they guessed was the right one.
No one I have switched to FireFox ever searches for Google, I always teach them about the search button, whilst covering the benefits of "open in new tab" when doing searches.
As for instructions in the microsoft browser, I always show them how to get to Mozilla.org then download and install FireFox or just walk away, I have no desire to contribute to the idiocy of the world (and yes, I do it every single time and I don't forget thunderbird).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The reason google should be obligated is because of the great power they wield. Much like Microsoft and other Monopolies have to work extra hard to play fair. I don't know if google could yet be classified as a monopoly, but i think they're damn close given that Yahoo has basically thrown in the towel to them.
How are they a monopoly? They've got market share, but anybody can start a search engine. I think you'll be waiting awhile for the monopoly ruling.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I am a user that google claims to give the best results to, if flash based sites are not indexed, then google is failing us.
So go start a search engine, or use someone that indexes flash.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Try www.bmw.com and then add your name to the list. I am not german.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Here's an idea: why not design your site to be useful? That way...you know...when people come across your site, they link to it. The hierarchy of the Google indexing scheme is very complex indeed (much like that last sentence). Google is free. In fact it is one of the best free things on the net, IMO.
;)
Now, I don't know about you, but it really irks me when I search for something, and I get a bunch of results, only to find that the site Google takes me to isn't in fact of any relevance to what I was searching for, but a site that takes you to more sites that have absolutely nothing to do with your original query in the first place. Not in the slightest bit am I going to criticize Google for delisting bmw.de.
And as with anything created by humans, it's bound to have a few flaws. But I know when I use Google to search for something, 98.9% of the time I get relevant search results, and within 5 mins of looking through what it spews out I'm well on my way to learning whatever is was that I searched for in the first place. Google has made me a fluent programmer in Visual Basic 6, HTML, XHTML, CSS, and is currently helping me learn C++. That's really the only stuff that matters anyway.
Maybe a better word would be "consumers".
Wow, slashdotters truly don't know a single thing about how Google works?
Do you honestly think the results are sorted by pagerank, instead of by relevance?
This isn't your altavista.digital.com-era search engine. .
Well then you need this software. Or maybe even this slightly cheaper one.
>>
I am the director, and this is my movie
There is quite a difference between SPAM and SEO -- or at least there is supposed to be.
Pre-google, very few websites used the title, h1, h2, link anchor text etc. tags very well. Since Google uses these tags to greatly influence the way the page is categorized, SEO was really a way to optimize the basic HTML to do things like put headers in header tags. For many people, it really worked out well -- by using the tags properly we effectively were giving more meta data for the search engines to use for examining our webpages.
Unfortunately, as we all know, some people go way beyond simple optimizations and do things like spam forums, blogs, etc.
Is there any reason that the search engines can't take these redirects into account? The spider visits a site, searches for redirects and indexes the amount of data a human eye could read in the time the redirect takes?
I really think adding "human discretion" into the impartial world of search engines is a wrong and potentially very dangerous move.
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
MS has an monopoly aquired illegally and maintained via illegal methods. They strongarmed (more likely strongarm, i.e. NOT past tense) theur customers to do what they want. Most importantly, they punish those that support any competitors by charging them FULL price and telling others to not deal with them (i.e. businesses have suddenly had to pay full price followed by CompUSA no longer carrying them with compusa quietly telling them that MS insists that they no longer carry the blacklisted company).
Currently, Google has a monopoly, but it was aquired naturally (so far, I have not heard anybody saying that it was aquired in illegal methods), and is held via legal methods. In no ways has Google attempted to prevent any site from making their product palatable to MSN, AOL, Yahoo, or even any start-ups (which is where Google's real threat lies). Google has been upfront on the rules and they are simple; No deciption. If you want flash, well, google does not care. But they do not parse flash well. If you want PDF, well, they do so-so at that as well. Afterall, Google is a WEB search engine. Google is upfront with how they will operate and so far, I have not heard anybody say that they are being unfair.
In fact, until MS declared them public enemy number one, Google was liked by everyone. Now, I see ppl bitching that Google has too much power and looks for ways to stop them via none competition. I have no doubt that MS is trying like heck to get congress to do the job that they are unable to do; bring down Google.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
One can argue that BMW's behavior was improper and that Google's reaction was justified. But claiming that displaying different content to different classes of users (crawler, real-life person) constitutes "fraud" is going over the top.
No, it is NOT fraud to display different kinds of content to different site visitors, and I hope it never will be. And if it were fraud, it would be a matter for the police, not Google's page rank algorithm.
You mean, just like anyone can start a software company to compete with Microsoft?
Monopoly power means they control the market. There are barriers to entry which make it difficult to compete. Among those barriers is that they already have a large user base, not to mention petabytes of indexed and cached content from many years of operation. Just to catch up to where google is now would take a competitor many years, and google would not be standing still.
Google is driving its competition out of business, and there will only be "one true search engine" by the time it's all done. Oh sure, there will be tons of Alta Vista's and Excites and Hotbots, but they simply won't be relavent. If we're lucky, there will be companies that provide different ways to view the google data, sort of an ask jeeves built on a google API, but that's about it, and since google will control the data, they will also control those companies.
Make no mistake, google is already dangerously powerful. You just don't see it yet.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
That's like if Microsoft decided to cut off sales of Windows SDKs to an application software vendor who it decided didn't play by the rules... but of course, they're free to develop desktop applications for other operating systems.
You mean like they effectively do with driver signing and co-branding?
I do not see how this shows their growing power. Maybe their power is infact growing, however, in this case, they are exercising "power" over their own service which they provide.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
That's really the point. You have three choices. a) design in the google dictated way. b) design however you like, and if your rank suffers, use tools like this (ie, cheat) or c) design however you like, and if your rank suffers, wallow in self pitty and obscurity.
Given those choices, most honest people would choose a, while dishonest would choose b... next to nobody would choose c.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I kind of hope that the whole backlash here is aimed not at BMW, but at the sleezy swine who sell SEO services.
Wouldnt be surprised if IE7 (when it gets out of beta), has support for Active-SEO-Script and built in auto-affliate subscription, and whatever other crap comes out next.
I had not thought about, but yeah, I suspect that you are correct. Fortunately, they are offering up a targeted market, rather than just selling the info to a bunch of companies who then own that info about us. And yes, there is a BIG difference. I have noticed how companies such as news.com's or Denverpost's ad server track me (The shear number of MS ads from other site targeting me for being a linux hacker is incredible; it has shown me that they know where I live, and some of my interests; very scarey and very annoying). Google has info about me, but I have purposly created accounts to see how they do things. I see sites that are using Google ads, but they are not obnoxious. They all appear to be smaller and do not throw an audio track set to 100% at me.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Google ranking is solely Google's prerogative; it's like saying that Ebert can't pan a movie without referring it to a "neutral third party". Anyway, it's just embarrassing to BMW, they won't lose any sales. No one orders a BMW by searching for "German car".
And, as a company who "do[es] no evil," they have a responsibility to deliver quality product - that is, users who both trust the results and are interested in the products advertised - to their customers.
...but is it art?
So, you think you have the right to dictate how they rank their pages? That's what you want, after all. You're not willing to just build an honest website, you want people to look at it even when they weren't looking for it. But that's not enough either, when Google fixes this, and lets people look at what they're searching for again, you demand the right to dictate to them that they must show your crud anyway.
You have the right to lie, of course. Just not the right to force everyone to believe it. Dumbass.
You mean, just like anyone can start a software company to compete with Microsoft?
No, I mean that anyone can create a search engine. All you need is a working server and advertising. You don't have to worry about people that built their business on google or somebody shipping google on all of Dells PCs or any of that crap. Jumping ship is as simple as changing a bookmark.
Google is driving its competition out of business
By building a better product. This is called competition - learn to compete better.
Make no mistake, google is already dangerously powerful. You just don't see it yet.
Oh, I agree with that, but they aren't a monopoly. Simply put, their star is ascendent.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
the doorway page contained the word "gebrauchtwagen" - meaning "used car" in German
Apparently, the people at that other site don't seem to understand much German, and don't know how to use a dictionary either. According to the original blog the abused term was "BMW Neuwagen", meaning "new BMW car(s)".
But anyway, I agree:
Sounds like fraud to me.
And it's good that Google also takes action against such big corporate sites. The message has a better chance to be heard by everyone.
Where, exactly, did I say I wanted to dictate how they rank their pages? I didn't.
What I did say was that google has an imperfect algorithm, and along with punishment for trying to get around that imperfect algorithm, creates a situation where they dictate the rules, and the punishment for not following them.
Personally, I would have no problem with google if a) their algorithm were fair and indexed all kinds of content b) they didn't 'punish' sites for trying to level the playing field or c) there was some viable compeition to google so that market forces could compensate.
It's this "follow our rules or be punished" attitude that's disturbing.
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you'd decide to visit the german website of bmw? google refers to the dot.com page! now who do you think get's the pagerank in the end? and who do you think get's p***ed of by not beeing able to find bmw-germany? (ok, you're right, but im trying not to back those middleaged dentists with their xl bankaccounts ;)
because in the end it's still bmw who's no.1, up on top, but google is getting worthless for an everyday user, who now has to type in the url manually.
i'm worried about google since the china case, and it seems to me, that their policies are getting more vague every day.
but for now lets have some popcorn and wait til the day, google starts to spill out mercedes instead of bmw.
Maybe it would help if you think of it as a slight addition to the pagerank algorithm.
if(content_shown_to_google != content_shown_to_user) pagerank = 0;
I beg to differ. For me the real issue is someone trying to cheat. And Google apparently does have a system to fix that, as they've just shown.
Now tell me, Why would such a system necessarily have to be built into the software? More to the point, what would a software based system actually do? not show the page?
But that's what they just did manually, isn't it?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
So what are they waiting for to leverage that power to delist those obnoxious "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" or "Flash Player Required" sites? They're a Linux shop, aren't they, so why don't they use the force they're bestowed with?
A) Their algorithm is likely as fair as they can make it.
B) Then don't think of it as punishment. Think of it as sites making themselves unrankable by trying to game the algorithm.
C) Competition is good, bring it on. Oh, and don't forget to thank Microsoft for trying to strangle the entire technology industry, lord knows there'd be loads of competition everywhere, if they weren't using illegal tactics to try and squash it at every turn.
Is this the same reason I can never find the page of Olympic Airlines by Googling?
Ooh yes lemme bite lemme bite lemme bite!
1) We don't speak English on Slashdot, we write it.
2) In the US of A proper nouns like Churchill and Endinburgh are written thus.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
The entire German management of BMW has disappeared as well, along with several nearby dairy farms and a brewery.
A brewery?? Oh noes!
Won't somebody think of die Kinder?
Metacrawler - search the search engines ...
Question Authority before IT questions You
Interestingly the page Matt Cutts complained about in this post is now 404.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Read what the GP wrote. He didn't say it isn't good. He says they have a lot of power, and it might not always be use for good purposes.
If you think you can write a better page-ranking algorithm than Google, do it. It will make you very, very rich.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
i guess we should call 'em Soylent instead?
The 'whims' of Google's that you're complaining about are just common sense. Google says, make your page clear and informative. If your page is clear and informative, guess what? Google ranks it higher. If your page is clear and informative and has something interesting to say, other people will find it interesting and link to it. If other people link to it, guess what? Google ranks it higher. Google says, don't change your URLs too often. That's common sense, too. If you ceaselessly redesign your site, leaving old URLs dangling as 404 errors, you're hurting people who link to you, and you're hurting people who've bookmarked you. That's common sense, too. All my bookmarks to my bank's site no longer work, because every time they do a redesign they change their URLs, and leave the old ones dangling. Sooner or later, that's going to annoy me enough to make me change banks.
If you do a Google search for 'Simon Brooke', you'll find me at the top although my home page is just that, a personal home page, and has no 'optimisation'. Simon Brooke the Insurance Broker, with an expensive, professionally designed site, comes second. Then there's Simon Brooke the professional actor on IMDB, then a guy who's into aeroplanes, then Simon Brooke the author.
So with all those people with something to sell in the list, how come I and the aeroplane geek make the first page? My site is simple and has been there a long time (more than ten years now, and on the same URL for eight). In that time a lot of people have linked to it, and it doesn't suffer link rot. The plane geek's page gets ranked well because he has good pictures which presumably get linked to.
And that's the lesson for all you soi disant web designers out there. Users aren't impressed with your fancy, flash 'splash pages', and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with text as graphics, and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with vacuous marketing puff, and guess what? Google isn't either.
If you've got something interesting and different to say, and you say it clearly, and you say it consistently in the same place, Google will find you. Tricks and cheats aren't needed.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Why would we want Google to link us to pages that we can't legally view? They're useless to most of us, and you want us to waste our time having to close the Macromedia spam windows? No thanks, I will not install a virus or malware just to view what should be on a web page. I don't appreciate Macromedia's attempts to damage my computer. Thanks for helping them with their abuse.
> Is this then a violation
Of course it is. If you don't actually have the content on your site, then you are dishonest if you claim to have it. Why are ethics such a hard thing for so many people to understand? If you lie, it is wrong.
that would be nice, but it wouldn't get rid of those link farms that scrape content from other websites
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Because they used open standards and you used proprietary crap? If you want to be accessible to users, follow the standards. If you don't give a shit about your users but just want to show off what a clever web designer you are, don't complain of Google doesn't give a shit about you.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Yet there's something different between the ordinary spammer/search results manipulator, and bmw.de: the ordinary spammer has little content and zapping it usually improves the browsing experience of google users. Less V14gr4 and stuff. On the other hand, Google becomes less accurate by resetting the pagerank of bmw.de pages. If i search for bmw i would expect to find the official site among the first ones.
IMHO the lesson is: Monopoly isn't good, even if the monopolist isn't evil.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
First China, now this... what happened to "Do no evil", Google?
If you configure Firefox to accept Google's cookie for the session only, and access Google via a different random open proxy each day, then they aren't even able to save that much information about you. The ten-results-per-page default is a bit of a bummer; but it's still nothing that can't be got around with a simple local proxyserver, in a few lines of Perl, just to send a sanitised version of the preferences cookie to Google {via the proxy-of-the-day of course}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Microsoft has a monopoly? Thats rich! Of what are they the sole supplier?
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
That's all well & good, but let's for a second forget that we're dealing with Google, here.
So far, the intentions of Google have largely been for the good, but what if someone else pips them for the top spot and they're in a less than egalitarian mind set?
Wouldn't we be presented with a situation whereby this new search engine super-power could dictate the rules?
However, all of this is pure speculation, but it's worth baring in mind, because not only is it feasible, it's entirely possible...
Unfortunate... www.expertsexchange.com can be read a few ways....
Who knows, maybe this'll be the case. Wasn't there a story about Gubuntu? ;)
I sometimes use "googlebot" as a browser ident string. It tends to get you into places that otherwise expect a subscription
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
A computer is unable to actually understand the site content in any meaningfull sense. That would require sentience. The Google spider will simply parse the site, and the search engine will do a word search from the database of parsed sites. The list returned this way needs to be ordered somehow, and structure is one valid way of doing this, since it gives hints of how various words may be related to each other in the page.
In short, your complain is stupid; now matter how Google ordered the results, you could always claim that it is unfair to you.
A Flash-based site is not a website. A website is HTML-based. What you have is a Flash file that happens to be reachable through the HTTP protocol, not a website. I don't know if Google can parse Flash at all, but if it does, be thankfull of that and don't complain.
And Flash is not user friendly, and everyone hates it. Don't kid yourself.
Well, for starters, your competitor used appropriate technology - HTML - so that his site is accessible to both humans and search engines, while you made a Flash file and pretended that to be a web site (which it is not). If you insist on putting information in a format that cannot be used effectively, don't be surprised that man and machine alike will skip it.
In short, your competitor has a better site than you do, so he gets a better pagerank.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
>> Your argument is strictly about fraudsters, but this was not a case of fraud from what I understand. It was simply a case of their site not being search engine friendly, and trying to improve their rank because they didn't design their site in such a way as to comply with googles commandments.
You are missing the point. I'm sure BMW Germany didn't do this with the intent to defraud, but ignorance is not an excuse to violate policies.
Google's intention -- and I hope or wish the same from other search engines -- is to rank its index by each site's *natural* relevance to a specific topic, theme, or keyword. And the best way, at least with our currently available technology, to assess relevance is by analysing context in as close a way as humans do. After all, *humans* are the ones who ultimately will decide if what they found in search engines results is what they were looking for.
This has always been the goal of every search engine or web index: to discern relevance from context as humans do, so that humans in turn can find the appropriate content when searching for it.
Now, there is a special technical limitation to this, and it is that machine analysis of content is currently limited to mostly textual materal, that is, it is virtually impossible, or at least impractical, for a computer to assess context from image, video, or any audio or visual data -- in a way that will match the way humans do.
So you have various choices when designing your site:
A. You can make it purely textual, so that humans as well as machines can read it. Fully search-engine friendly, but we both will agree that this is not too interesting for the average consumer.
B. You can make it purely multi-media, with videos, images, animation, etc. for it to be more exciting and attractive to your visitors, but alienating search engines, and possibly sacrificing substance.
C. Make a hybrid of "A" and "B", so that it's enticing and interesting for your visitors, yet contains enough textual content for them -- and for machines -- to understand your product or service.
Most organizations choose "C", understanding that a purely sensorial experience for their visitors might be interesting and exciting, but might lack the substance that will turn them into believers of your service or product. BMW Germany decided to go with "B", and artificially add "A" for the benefit of search engines.
This not only violates most search engines' policies, but it makes the relevance of your site suspect -- to machines -- since they cannot correlate the content within the "hidden" search-engine-friendly pages and the "real" content offered to humans. Innocently or not, they attempted to "game" the system, and lost.
So Google is not dictating how you should design your site, being included in search engine results is not a god-given right, and you can certainly ignore them. But if you want your sites found by customers who use search engines -- the de facto "yellow pages" of the Internet -- you should make sure that you follow long established and well accepted standards of content and design.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
What Google has been doing there seems to me very highly unreasonable. As a search engine, Google should return what I am looking for, as best as it can. Now if I type in "BMW Germany", what do you think I am looking for? For that search, BMW's German webpage should come first, no matter what points some stupid ranking algorithm gives them.
Where this is getting completely bizarre, making Google useless, is when you try to search for a specific hotel. If I type in the name of a hotel and the town, Google should first of all give me the webpage of that hotel. It doesn't. It gives me thirty different links to agencies trying to flog off hotels at cheaper prices, even if they cannot even offer that specific hotel! This is complete madness.
I have a great idea which might help you with your problem: if you're so keen on finding bmw.de, then I strongly encourage you to type "http://www.bmw.de" in the address bar of your web browser, then hit "Enter". Magic!
You should remember that:
I am not german.
But BMW is, strangely enough.
"And, as a company who "do[es] no evil," they have a responsibility to deliver quality product - that is, users who both trust the results and are interested in the products advertised - to their customers."
Unless those users happen to be in China...
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Well, the person responsible for that website certainly has their own agenda. In my opinion it's a bunch of lies, innuendos, half-truths and fakery by a top level troll; but opinions are like arseholes - everybody has one! :-)
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
Google is a company. As a website owner they will help people find your site for free so you can do business IF you follow there terms. As a web user they help you find the sites that are making use of their free indexing service and following the rules. Search engines are by no means required to list ANY page, and while I certainly wouldn't agree with a search engine that delists on more sheisty terms (for example, delisting Microsoft.com because they are linux users) it is still their right to do that. It's not like BMW is losing a service they paid for, they are losing a free service they abused. So now, BMW of Germany is forced to clean up their act, or move on to traditional marketing to get people to their site, boo freakin hoo. Access to a search engine isn't a right for anyone, its a privlidge.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
A monopoly is not about being a sole supplier. It is about controlling something. Just as google is not the sole supplier of search engines, At this point, they are a monopoly. They aquired theirs naturally (in legal terms, that simply means via compitition) and legally.
MS has been ruled to be a monopoly in at least 5 different court cases. For example, the recent case in America, where the feds ruled MS to be a monopoly. Or in EU, where they ruled them to be a monopoly. Or in Korea, Japan, etc. Even now, MS dictates conditions to companies such as CompUSA and can tell them to not carry certain products (or risk having products shipped 1-2 weeks late or losing their MS advertising dollars).
BTW, the still control the desktop (at least 85% and probably closer to 90) as well as the Office packages(at least 90%). That alone makes them a monopoly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Their customers are advertisers. Their product is you and me.
However, Google's #1 philosophy is:
Focus on the user and all else will follow. As witnessed here: http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
Google's product is searching for the user. Advertisers simply dump money to them because of the prime real estate as a byproduct.
I dunno. Maybe when it's assholes ranting that Google should cater to them, even when their websites don't deserve it, all the while crying like a sissy that they have to conform to Google's standards... maybe that just reminds me of Microsoft. That's their sort of attitude, after all.
Or maybe they've literally screwed up everything for us for the past 20 years, and when I see someone succeed (Google) despite them playing every dirty trick they can think of, I can't help but mention it.
Oh, and finally, no, you're not new here. You're a worthless AC. That's about x10,000 worse.
Exactly right, thank you for explaining it so well for everyone.
If SEO experts want to play dubious games and try to improve their search ranking they are welcome to try. If Google doesn't like their tactics they are welcome to give those sites zero pagerank. Not everything Google does is perfect, but if they can encourage web designers to meet a higher standard that is unquestionably a Good Thing.
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Maybe... go to google and try to search for
google sucks
Server Error
The server encountered an error and could not complete your request.
If the problem persists, please mail error@google.com and mention this error message and the query that caused it.
the first result for searhing for SEO on google is this
google webmaster info
the page has some usefull info for webmasters (obviously BMW didn read it before attemptign black hat seo techniques)
i found the first paragraph amusing
# Be wary of SEO firms that send you email out of the blue. Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
"Dear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."
Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.
Now if only they could take care of the rest of Bavaria...
A company exerting control over the use of its own database and resources, yeah that's pretty crappy. They should hand all their servers over to the U.N. or something and just let everyone do what they want with them. Anything less would be evil right?
What I did say was that google has an imperfect algorithm, and along with punishment for trying to get around that imperfect algorithm, creates a situation where they dictate the rules, and the punishment for not following them.
Alternatively, consider the rules and the punishment to be part of that algorithm. Just because they aren't handled automatically doesn't make them any less relevent as part of the algorithm.
It's this "follow our rules or be punished" attitude that's disturbing.
It's no different to any other advertising medium.
Want to advertise on billboards? The billboard owner and the ASA dictate the sort of content you're allowed to put up. If you piss off the public then it's also likely to come back to bite you in the arse when they complain to either.
In both these cases the rules are good for the consumer - they punish you for putting up misleading or offensive content.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
What Google has been doing there seems to me very highly unreasonable. As a search engine, Google should return what I am looking for, as best as it can.
And that was exactly the problem. The BMW website had a fake front page, with a lot of words that did not exist on the real front page. So, when people searched for those words, the BMW website would come up, and people would go there expecting to find what they were searching for. Which wasn't there.
Google solved the problem by removing the BMW web page from their index until BMW removes the fake pages, so that google can index them correctly.
The funny thing is, CSS can reformat for the handheld media, no separate page needed.
Oh, give me a break.
Fact 1: Google make bucketloads of cash by running automated algorithms that crawl the web. They have even used the fact that they are just running automated processes and they don't do any manual processing as a defence in court.
Fact 2: Google "terms of service" have no legal weight here. They cannot tell me what I may, or may not, put on my own web site. Whether they choose to list it, and if so how, might depend on what content I provide, but that's as far as their power goes (and even then, they would have certain obligations to be fair and representative in most jurisdictions).
Fact 3: Adjusting your web site to get more favourable results in automated search engine listings is industry standard practice, and there is a whole "search engine optimisation" sub-industry full of people who analyse these things for a living and tell you how to adapt your site to benefit from them. There is, as far as I am aware, nothing illegal about this in any jurisdiction; it is simply the flip-side of the coin. (The fact that BMW apparently aren't very good at SEO is irrelevant to this point.)
Note 4: My German is rusty and the page now seems to have disappeared, but from what I saw, the web page BMW was showing to customers who visited their site seems to have been a reasonable page, without undue emphasis or misleading information.
Conclusion: The fact that Google was getting served something else, after advertising that it was visiting the web site not as a potential customer but as a machine, is Google's problem rather than BMWs. Google can, and have, adjusted their listing as a consequence. However, what law, exactly, has BMW even come close to breaking here?
Whether Google should be allowed to react in the way they did, given their significance in the web world today but also BMW's apparent awareness of Google's mechanisms and their intent to circumvent Google's stated policy, is another question.
Perhaps more significantly, whether Google can ever again rely on the claim that their algorithms are purely automated as a justification for other actions is also a different question.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They tried that, and the SEOs were just finding new strategies to get around it.
This way, they can just directly (in effect) shut down SEOs by delisting them.
BMW-Motorrad.de was listed at the time of my posting. In fact, it was the top entry. It is one click away from BMW.de and two clicks away from many other BMW sites. What wasn't listed at the time of my posting was, as you so astutely observed, BMW.de.
So Google took out both of BMW's sites in Deutschland, I still believe they got what they deserved.
If you search bmw deutschland, the third result is www.bmwfs.de, a redirection to bmw.de. Google didn't block this one...
Not all SEOers are the same. There is legal optimization, and that is to build the page such that a search engine can index the site content and that the site will be listed with the search queries that are relevant to the site content. I bet google sees nothing wrong with improving the site responsiveness to indexing.
?SYNTAX ERROR
see, it's really a drag that we can't redefine words as we like. A monopoly means being the sole supplier of something:
# (economics) a market in which there are many buyers but only one seller; "a monopoly on silver"; "when you have a monopoly you can ask any price you like"
# exclusive control or possession of something; "They have no monopoly on intelligence"
# a board game in which players try to gain a monopoly on real estate as pieces advance around the board according to the throw of a die
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
# In economics, a monopoly (from the Greek monos, one + polein, to sell) is defined as a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a kind of product or service. Monopolies are characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
If the judges really had found microsoft guilty of being a monopoly (instead of say, violating obscure anti-trust regulations) they'd be in error, no matter how often they'd judged wrongly.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
I live in germany, and googlebombing is a big problem here. Not BMW in particular, but a lot of other sites exist that are just doorway pages filled with names of ALL german cities, and ALL terms like "shopping" "computer" etc etc. Then, they lead to pages with just banners and no content. I'm very happy to see google doing something about this, even when it's only BMW at the moment.
But you don't think it's dangerous that a site that has a de-facto monopoly on searches is doing this?
;-)
Look at it this way. BMW felt that Google was putting them too low on the search list. So they make a page to 'fix' this. Then Google de lists them.
If Google was one of many equally popular search engines, I'd say that they were within their rights to do this. But they aren't. People use 'Google' as a verb, i.e. just f**king Google it. Most of the world uses them as their only search engine. So if I have a site, and I'm way down on the list, I'll try to fix it. Now I could use a different search engine of course, and even lobby other people to do the same. But my customers will still be using Google.
Actually, I do some work on a site with an open source FAT32 formatter. It's pretty popular, I get a 2-3 emails a day with people that have downloaded it, and all of them are satisfied. Now this site is way down on the list with any reasonable search terms, unless you know the name of the company. I actually emailed them, and got a reply IIRC about buying advertising. My solution was to email people who are high up on the pagerank and get them to link to me. And link to it from here, tight bastard that I am
So suddenly you have a de facto monopoly, and thus pagerank is valuable enough that they can charge for it, and punish people for trying to exploit it. That doesn't sit too well with me. Whatever you think of the people that run Google, in the end it is a business and one that has carved out a rather novel monopoly. And history shows that businesses have a tendency to exploit that in a way that is in their interests, even when their interests diverge from most people's.
The interesting thing is that in America at least, the law says that there are things like tying agreements that are legal unless you are a monopoly (or abusive monopoly, I forget the wording). So Microsoft could insist that you used Internet Explorer with Windows and not break the law, right up to the lawsuit that declared them to be a monopoly at which point it became illegal. But for Google, I don't think there is any legal restraint on them. They could of course claim that they are a not a monopoly, on the grounds that mind share is not market share, and people are still free to use yahoo or altavista. And asking for money to improve pagerank, or delisting people that try to exploit it would probably still be legal even if their competitors managed to get a Microsoft style judgement against them.
You have to remember Adam Smith's quote:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together," he wrote, without concocting "a conspiracy against the public."
I.e. that businesses have zero qualms about creating and abusing monopoly power. It's not about Bill Gates being a bad person, or the Google guys being good ones. It's something that businesses do, if they want to succeed and keep the shareholders happy. And in the Google case, it's a new sort of monopoly, one that won't be restrained by the laws that affected Microsoft, not that those proved particularly effective in any case.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
"Most of the world uses them as their only search engine. "
2 156451) in the US, Google had a 46.3% share, Yahoo 23.4%, MSN 11.4%, AOL 6.9% with the rest being MyWay, Ask, Earthlink, Dogpile, Netscape,iWon, and "others." And the totals seem somewhat volatile with Google at 36.5% and yahoo at 30.5% and MSN at 15.5% just shortly before that.
:-)
According to the stats I've seen (e.g. Nov 2005 from NetRatings/SearchEngineWatch http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/
While Google does indeed have a large share, it isn't even a majority anywhere that I've seen. The only point is that not everyone (or even a majority) uses Google. At least for the US.
And I've actually switched back to Yahoo myself recently.
That's rather a poor moral argument, given that companies like Google fundamentally take advantage of others for their entire business model.
I'm all for a reasonable balance between fair use and copyright protection, but there is a trend recently for services that just leach others' content and put it up there with their own advertising or other services attached, claiming that this falls under fair use or similar terms in law. Search engines do it. Usenet archives do it. Web archive/caching systems do it. Now we have news aggregators that do it, automatically copying not just headlines but also the first few words of a story from other sites.
Sites like these appear, at first glance, to provide obviously useful services. However, part of that is just familiarity: to many newer Internet users, web searches are simply The Way Things Are Done. And yet, the web developed quite happily for years with no automated search features; it is inherently a medium where content of interest to the reader links naturally to other related content. Who is to say that if the automated search engines disappeared tomorrow, something better wouldn't spring up in their place next week?
Moreover, there is the small matter of fairness. Is it morally right that any site can dramatically affect the success of another site based on whether and how it leaches that other site's own content? These automatic middleman sites don't really add anything in terms of creating content; at best they facilitate access to it, and the true value of that service is always less than the middleman makes it out to be (look at the major record labels or book publishers, and then look at the artists who actually make the music and the authors who actually write new books). However, because the big middleman deals with many little guys, he becomes disproportionately powerful, to the point where the little guy lives or dies by the treatment he receives, and there is little to ensure that that treatment will be fair and reasonable. So it has been for a while with those record labels and publishers, and so it is rapidly going with the web.
This is a rare area where I increasingly suspect that copyright laws don't go far enough. We are developing a culture where big name web sites (Google and DMOZ being two prime suspects here) can throw their weight around, with little or no effort to respect the wishes of those who actually provide the valuable content on which they rely. If the occasional little guy gets trampled in the rush, is that really just collateral damage, necessary for the greater good? I'm really not sure any more.
(Full disclosure: I once had a rather irritating discussion with a DMOZ editor, about a web site I maintain. I was asking for a minor change in the way the site's details were listed. The editor agreed that the change I was asking for was reasonable, and that leaving it as it was would potentially be inconvenient to several parties at a later date. However, DMOZ policies prevented the editor from making the change. The damage caused was hardly earth-shattering, just some minor inconvenience all round. However, I found the attitude displayed -- that the wishes of the webmasters volunteering useful content for others to read should be entirely subservient to the wishes of DMOZ users who are just consumers of that information and of DMOZ itself, a mere content-borrowing middleman -- deeply offensive.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
What I'd like from Google (or any other search engine), is to allow me to specify domains which to exclude from my search results; they already keep settings stored in a cookie, why not link it to a personal list of "exclusions" stored in a database somewhere?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Jeez. If you don't like it, use a different Search Engine. /Mad
This is nothing about "google's whims". Bmw.de showed a different page to the google crawler than to users. This is useful for nothing but trying to get an (unearned) better rank from google. These people could have made a site, without any concern for how google would treat it, and recieved a reasonable rank. No conforming nessecary.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
One said 'Owdy... ... and that caused all this trouble.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
The poor people that can't figure out that the BMW web site is www.bmw.com. To be honest if they can't figure that one out, then they can't be bright enough to afford a new BMW (can you guess the ones for Holden and Ford).
The blocked URL is www.bmw. de , jack ass. I can only assume that you do not drive new BMW either.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
That a decision is based on technical reasons does not make it arbitrary. Qantas will not take you to the ISS. While there are technical reasons why this may be so (it's hard to get good lift outside the atmosphere), it's still a case of Qantas arbitrarily choosing one sort of destination over another.
If you think that indexing flash content will pull in a lot of users, figure out how to do it well and peddle your technology to Google, Microsoft, and competitors.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
So is this gonna cause their stock to go down more? I'm sure in a year no one is going to remember this or the DoJ investigation hullabaloo
Insert Sig Here
One thing Google nor any other search engine is good at is these generic searches. What are you looking for when you Google for 'failure'? Seriously: What searches are good results for 'failure'? Failuring in cooking? Failure in engineering? If you wanted to find a specific failure, why not be more specific with your search? Google nor any other search engine can read one's mind.
Given a lack of anything more specific, it does a 'guess' on what people generally consider a failure. Sampling from many sources shows what many places across the internet consider that to be. If the result makes one uncomfortable it isn't Google's fault.
Blogs are fine to index. They hold a lot of relevancy especially on current topics. To ignore them seems to be a big mistake. Just because something is opinionated doesn't mean its worthless to index or include in searches. If one wants an unbias search result, refine your search to make it unbias.
Luxury car makers have recently made quite a business out of leasing new vehicles and then reselling them as Used cars once the lease expires. Because Used has some negative connotations in the car selling world, the manufacturers have come up with all sorts of colorful descriptions such as "Certified Pre Owned". Seems to me that this was an effort to equate Used with CPO in searching. Is it fraud? Probably not. It's safe to say that BMW and their network of dealers have the largest inventory of Used BMWs available anywhere.
...that what Google's doing here is insuring the quality and integrity of that product.
Advertisers can't get to you if you don't use Google. If they allow gaming of the pagerank features of the search engine to go undealt with, then we quit using Google because it's not anywhere near as good- because that too is a product. You see, Google's got two products going on here, one that is provided as a free service in order to obtain the materials (as it were) for the second one that you mentioned . If the first product isn't palatable to the first set of customers, the second set won't get their product offering- and they're the one's paying for it all.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Well, what happened was that BWM.DE was trying to corner the Internet market for used BMW cars. They spammed searches not for "BWM Germany" but "used BWMs" and the like. And it's not like Google didn't warn them beforehand.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
www.bmw.com?
..."
Unless you're German, speak German and prefer to read web sites in German, when it's www.bmw.de.
Jeez, and you yanks still get upset when we accuse you of insularity.
"CNN World News. Today, in Washington,
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
hey man, you shouldn't take the "donut oil" bit.....
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
"Certified pre-owned" is not merely a euphemism for "used". In order to sell a car with that moniker the manufacturer requires the dealer to check the car against an extensive checklist of possible defects and problems and to correct them if necessary. As a result, the dealer can offer the car with a manufacturer-backed warranty.
New car dealers generally sell used cars of various makes but can only offer "certified pre-owned" cars of the make the dealer sells new. So a Ford dealer may sell used Chevrolets, Saabs and Toyotas but the only "certified pre-owned" used cars it will sell will be Fords.
Insert witty sig here.
But they aren't. As soon as they are seen as abusive, we wouldn't even need to wait for the next elections to "throw them out". Just switch to a different search engine...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Crap. I'm sorry: www.openoffice.org - reads and writes all microsoft office formats. If developers wanted to create platform independant applications it sure isn't Microsoft that's stopping them: http://www.trolltech.com/, http://www.cygwin.com/. Platform independance is just very pricy, a problem that's no being caused by Microsoft.
>As for barriers to entry, Microsoft's illegal "monopoly abusing" deals for OEMs give one
They said: "If you start carring other operating systems, we won't sell you ours anymore". Sure, not the best thing to happen from the consumer point of view, but illegal or immoral? Hardly. My girlfriend tells me "sleep with an other woman and you'll never see me nacked again". Is she abusing her monopoly? See, there are no close substitutes, as she is just really very fine and all. One could say her body is my de-facto standard when it comes to sex. Also, market entry for other girls is prohibitivly expensive, I just don't know how to deal with them. Should I sue her because she reserves the right to sleep with me on her own terms?
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Ooooh, 3 digit UID. Better show some respect to the elderly.
Have a care, sir, or I shall take of my belt, and by God, my trousers will fall down!
P.S. "Dodgy" is USian too.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Or at least I think so. I tried to research this topic by googling for "search engine fraud", but I think google was on the fritz, as all it ever found was "Cudly panda bears" and "A9.is.a.steaming.pile.of.shit.com"
--- What?
I could go on, of course, but, suffice it to say that my feeling is that Google is evolving away from the true indexing tool it started out as, and into a controller of information.
What a load of crap. Those obscure sites with "gems" in them ARE STILL THERE, and still linked from elsewhere on the Web (you remember those blue underlined things called "hyperlinks"?). Google does not "remove" them from the Internet. Moreover there are hundreds of search engines, with many new ones frequently being created, so if you insist on using a search engine, you have your choice of many.
Nobody is forced to use Google. Google only "adds" new options for you, they cannot "subtract" options: You're complaining because Google doesn't help you find backwater sites, but WTF, if Google never existed at all then you still wouldn't have it any better at finding those backwater sites!? Google cannot block websites, they cannot remove websites from the Internet, they cannot force all users searching for information to go through Google.com in order to do so, they cannot prevent other new search engines from entering the market. If Google isn't useful to you just don't use it. The very reason Google's user base rose so incredibly quickly was that so many people found it so useful.
Their customers are advertisers. Their product is you and me.
...
Yeah, but without US, they're nothing. If I prefer to search on Yahoo instead of Google, it makes Google less valuable as a website for advertisers. The best thing for Google to do is to keep ME happy, as that keeps the ADVERTISERS happy. And happy advertisers keep the moolah rolling in
But you don't think it's dangerous that a site that has a de-facto monopoly on searches is doing this?
You mean their shocking, world-gripping monopoly where they have 36.5% of all search traffic and switching is as easy as typing a slightly different URL into your browser?
I agree that we should keep an eye on them, but your unjustified alarmism is ridiculous.
First of all, Google isn't a monopoly. It may not be as popular as it once was, but Yahoo is still just as available as before, and so are a handful of other search engines. Google is just the most popular.
I remember a time when Yahoo was the "only" search engine, because nobody used Alta Vista or Google or DogPile or whichever other out of the bajillion engines were out there that I've forgotten. I see absolutely no problem with Google delisting sites that "misbehave." They have an algorithm that (at least, according to them) tries to give as accurate a result set as possible, and they don't want people trying to cheat the system. If they ever were to get out of hand and try to take over the internet, or any of the other such nonsense I've seen in response to this article today, either or both of the following would happen:
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
but I'd say the majority of google users do not share that perspective.
Clearly if the majority of users did share that perspective then AltaVista would still be a hugely popular search engine and Google would be nothing. People flocked to Google out of choice; unlike Windows nobody is was or ever has been forced in any way to use Google, not even indirectly.
They were spamming, they broke the rules google set, bammo, pagerank=0.
They're still listed on Yahoo (and other search engines).
Isn't this like a double edged sword? Google resets their pagerank and people can't find it anymore, so they jump over to the next search engine. Do this enough times, and people just stay at the other search engine.
Live forever, or die trying.
Honestly, nobody is forced to click on the first result that comes up in Google, and most users really are smart enough to be able to very quickly determine how relevant specific results in Google might be for them. For example, if I was looking for the website of the magazine called "Failure", it would take me all of about 50 milliseconds to see that I should click on the second result.
GoogleBombing may lead to nonsense like the above but it hardly impedes actual searches for information, it's more of a theoretical concern than a practical one. If it was such an awful problem then people would be moving away from Google. Fact is 99.9% of the time Google is still the best and quickest way to find pertinent information, and the day it stops being so is the day users flock elsewhere - and they'll do so, as quickly as they flocked to Google in the first place, because people can tell which search engines are good and which are not.
How do you know that Google will always do this for reasons you agree with?
Why would I need to?
Never forget that when Google started, everybody thought the search business was stable, and an uninteresting area for innovation. If Google starts to suck, or if somebody outdoes them significantly, I'll switch immediately. And you will, too.
Google is getting progressively more invasive and irritating. It's already rolled over to China -- how long before other countries Google is sucking up to can just demand that certain sites be permanently delinked?
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Because all roads lead to Rome?
I don't give a fuck what BMW "deserved." When I run a search engine, I want it to return the correct results for my search.
Okay, BMW was bad for fucking up my search by pushing their rank higher than it should be. Bad, bad BMW. No soup for you, BMW.
But now I'm supposed to think that Google is good for fucking up my search in the other direction? I don't think so. Fix your damn code, you lazy bums. These kinds of tactics are only going to make me move on to search companies which actually do what I want them to do, which is to help me find what I'm looking for.
The moment Google stops being the most useful tool for finding stuff on the web, they cease to have any reason to exist.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The bottom line is that Google wants to be the best search engine it can be.
They don't just want to. They need to!
Almost all the luxury brands have their entry level cars. What baffles me is why someone would pay so much extra for a small car when they could get almost all the luxury features in a more downmarket brand (VW for Audi, Honda for Accura, etc) and pay less or pay the same and get a bigger car.
I know when I see an Audi A4 or a BMW 3 series, I can't help but laugh at their desperate grab for status, often poorly masked by a desire for "performance".
The poor people that can't figure out that the BMW web site is www.bmw.com.
Whenever I need to look for a company's website, I put the company name into google unless I already know the site. Mostly because I have no idea if BMW's site is www.bmw.com, or something less obvious because some company named "Baseball Merchandise Warehouse" already owns bmw.com. So let's pretend BMW's site is really www.bmw-auto.com, which I might guess, or I might not, but I really don't feel like trying 50 things in hopes that one will work when google usually gets it for me on the first try.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Every auto-maker I've seen (at least in North America) uses Flash more than most Pr0n sites. They love those 3D views of the car, and the road moving under the car, and the clouds and menus... This isn't good for search engines.
I understand why they'd do it for this reason, but the key is how they went about it. If they make a text-only version of the site for Google, that's a-okay in my books. If they used a ton of keywords, then that's not as good.
Now I'd suggest that if Macromedia (et al.) really wanted people to use Flash, they'd create a 'text only' section that is easy for search engines to pick up and index.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Some alternative searches to try out:
ninja
ronin
Chuck Norris
Oh god, I just made a Chuck Norris joke. This taint, it will never come off.
Google is in no way dictating how you can design your site. Give me a break.
Design it how you want. They are just saying "It is my baseball, if you don't play by the rules we take our baseball (pagerank) home."
Design your site how you want. But if you want to be listed in googles rank you must follow their guidlines. It is THEIR site after all isn't it????
Matt Cutts, a Google employee who works to stop unethical search manipulation,
By "unethical," I hope the OP means "not profitable."
Last I checked, there's nothing unethical about trying to trick an autonomous search system into giving you a higher listing. We're not talking about kicking puppies here, folks. We're talking about Google protecting its ability to charge for a higher listing. Let's not trick ourselves into thinking that manipulating that is somehow against morals or the law.
<meta name="description" value="A small description of the page goes here."
Your rank in Google for any particular search is based primarily on how many people link to your site using specific words. If you have those words in your meta tags it helps Google decide what searches you appear on, but doesn't help boost your pagerank much.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
It's a red herring to concentrate on the technological limitations. Yes, there are currently technological limitaions, and to googles credit they appear to be spending money to solve some of those issues (though I don't think they're very high priority).
The problem is the limited technology coupled with the punishment for trying to "fix" googles weaknesses. If the problem were MERELY a case of spamming, fine. But the limitations of google technology create a situation where site designers either have to follow googles rules, or "cheat" if they want the exact same ranking they'd have if they'd designed the site in a way that was friendly to google.
I used flash as an example, but it's by far not the only issue. Suppose I create a site using nested tables, but a competitor creates one with a more semantic structure, but they contain virtually identical content? The competitor will get a better ranking.
I simply don't think that google should be "punishing" anyone for simply trying to address googles weaknesses. You can argue all day about semantics, but that doesn't change the fact that users with a browser can get a flash or nested table site to view just as easily as one google likes.
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Other forms of advertising generally don't wield the same kind of power as google does. If one tv station doesn't like your content, maybe another will, or perhaps radio or billboards. There's lots of viable competition. Google owns web searching. It's THE verb for searching, for crying out loud. Other search engines
Of course there are FCC or FTC consideration, but google is not a regulatory body. It doesn't control content (overlooking the recent China issues) but it does "play favorites".
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You didn't listen. The search engine does not understand the content of the page. It does not actually have anything resembling intelligence. This limit cannot be removed without making the engine sentient - alive.
And forcing a living creature to browse Flash-based sites is evil and cruel ;).
Perhaps you might be so kind to explain how it is possible to tell this kind of spamming from any other kind of spamming ? Because if it isn't possible, the choices are to allow all spamming or no spamming; the former makes the search engine useless, so the latter is pretty much the only possible choice.
As well as he should. A cleaner structure will render faster and is less likely to cause problems in browsers, and will work a lot better with text readers or whatever blind use to access the web, especially because very complex page structure is oftentimes a symptom of a designer who worries more about the look than usability of his website. Consequently, if the two sites contain identical content, then the cleaner one is likely to be more usefull to me, the search engine user, so it should receive better rank.
You, a website designer, see them as weaknesses, but I, a Google user, see them as strengths, since they encourage the designers to follow at least some level of quality in their designs. Basically, if a Flash file gets a lower rank in Google than a website, good. Maybe it will make Flash files less used in Net, which is only a good thing.
I have never come across a Flash site that wouldn't had made me wish that the whole thing hadn't just been done with HTML.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yes, just like it's easy to switch to a different browser, right? You can't control what end users do, and if they continue to use google, that means you have to continue to appease google.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Hahaha. Well, VB6 isn't all that bad. Wait...*remembers extensive Native API calls*...scratch that. VB SUXORS! /off topic. flame me //slashy ///fark.com has taught me well
Because that's not cheating; Gamasutra shows its content to Google and that helps Google index it. Even if you do need a registration to read Gamasutra, it benefits both the site, the search engine, and the user if the crawler is able to read all of the site's content. Gamasutra isn't providing fake content with lots of keywords to trick search engines, it's letting the search engine read all of its content.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
I have never come across a Flash site that wouldn't had made me wish that the whole thing hadn't just been done with HTML.
;) But I don't thrust my beliefs on my users. And, i find certain kinds of flash to be VERY useful (flash video, for instance, is far more compatible than Real or WMP for streaming). I also find flash for online games to be of better quality than most Java games.
Maybe not, but you clearly aren't speaking for everyone. I deal with end users. They *LIKE* flash. Site developers wouldn't design using it if users hated it, they'd get no traffic. Just because YOU dislike flash doesn't mean you should impose your belief on the web.
Having said that, I largely agree with you
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It is when they say "Stop carrying other operating systems and we'll give you a discount on ours."
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Sorry; I wasn't all that clear. I was writing about how things stood when Microsoft lost the anti-trust suit and became a "convicted monopoly". Now things are changing some, and I've not had too many compatibility problems with OO.o
If developers wanted to create platform independant applications it sure isn't Microsoft that's stopping them: http://www.trolltech.com/, http://www.cygwin.com/. Platform independance is just very pricy, a problem that's no being caused by Microsoft.
The problem isn't that Microsoft has/had a monopoly. That's fine and not nessecarily a bad thing. The problem was abuse of the monopoly, using their monoply in one market to push themselves into another and strongarm OEMs to keep them from providing the products of potential competitors.
They said: "If you start carring other operating systems, we won't sell you ours anymore". Sure, not the best thing to happen from the consumer point of view, but illegal or immoral? Hardly. My girlfriend tells me "sleep with an other woman and you'll never see me nacked again". Is she abusing her monopoly? See, there are no close substitutes, as she is just really very fine and all. One could say her body is my de-facto standard when it comes to sex. Also, market entry for other girls is prohibitivly expensive, I just don't know how to deal with them. Should I sue her because she reserves the right to sleep with me on her own terms?
This is a bit silly, but interpersonal communication and sex are governed by open standards. There are likely many potential partners which speak the same language as you and are physically compatible. As of 1999, there were no other programs that could reliably read and write the MS Office formats. So while one could say that "her body is my de-facto standard when it comes to sex", one would be using a different sense of "standard". Your girlfriend doesn't really have a monopoly.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
except that googling for bmw.com yields 1 result, and googling for bmw.de lists precisely 0. pagerank = 0 is virtual deletion. The page is as good as nonexistent. It's as relevant for that search as would be the wikipedia article on the bell pepper.
Actually looking at the blog that was posted at some point here will make it painfully obvious even to the non-german-speaking audience (me included) that the contents of the doorway page were wildly different from the actual visibile page. Hence what was happening was NOT that they were trying to be search engine friendly, but rather that they wilfully made their page arbitrarily more relevant by filling it with crud, rather than a case of "oh no, my site is covered in flash and images! I'll just have a text-rendering of it as fallback for search engines/non-X-enabled browsers"
Exactly... Most portable browsers understand CSS now. Just about the only thing that dosen't understand CSS are textmode browsers... And even then, textmode browsers often display normal pages gracefully; and though a site developed for textmode might be a little better, practically nobody uses textmode browsers.
Would an appropriate method have been for BMW to send off a friendly email to all the German websites that are results for the term BMW and ask that they use an actual link to the BMW site instead of just including the letters?
Is this really that different from manipulating results other ways? How different is it than if every instance of BMW on a German website were a link instead of just a term? Arguably, they should be links, shouldn't they? They make reference to a company and the reference should be a link, right?
Then there's the question of brand names. If I search for BMW, I should for damn sure have BMW at the top of the list.
Unlike — as was my point — with a government...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
In this case, Google is preventing the people from reaching the site they most propably want. It's their rules, of course, but these rules are supposed to serve a certain purpose. Not just to intimidate.
P.
I just found out that Google and VW are partnering to bring Google technology into the car by adding Google Earth navigation to VW's navigation system.
On the same day, BMW's website gets delisted?
Does anybody find this odd, or frightening?
I mean, what really happened here? Did BMW opt not to partner with Google? Did BMW not give Google some investment money? I mean, I am sure if Google partnered with BMW that Google wouldn't have delisted their website (instead, perhaps supporting BMW's practices and of course making sure BMW gets highly ranked).
This is yet more proof that Google is being corrupted by their increasing power.
Don't be fooled by Google's do no evil policy, they are just redefining what evil is. Google is an advertising web spam engine in sheep's clothing, coming out with technology supposedly to benefit mankind, but instead just ensuring more channels for advertising revenue.
I urge Slashdot to have a Google free day. Don't post one story about Google for a 24 hour period. If they can't, then Google has a stranglehold on the web that will eventually corrupt it and make us pay for blindly accepting and supporting them as we have.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Ironically, bmw-motorrad.de is relisted.
Ah, no disrespect. Just jealousy.
I've never really heard 'dodgy' on US TV/Movies (ie culture) before, and when I say it in computer games the 'USians' haven't heard of it.... and make amusing car reference.
That is all.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
You mean, just like anyone can start a software company to compete with Microsoft?
Yes.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Nonsense. They have customers in China as well - and those customers should be served. If obeying local laws is the only way to accomplish that, then that makes the laws the problem.
...but is it art?
It's better than Babelfish.
:)
It's Google (how appropriate) Translate then I changed the "Sie" to "du" and reconjugated the verb (I remember that much from High School German - don't use the Sie form for insults, use "du") and even converted to kilos.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
>That's precisely my point. Google is dictating how you must design your site.
Pedantry.
Society directs you not vote twice in an election. You won't get much sympathy bemoaning the shackles it puts on you.
In brick and mortar terms, you defend the practice of 'bait and switch'. You probably work in marketing, and drive a SUV with flags all over it to assuage your guilt. You probably LIKE Bush, cheat on your wife, and need shiny things to distract you.
I'll bet you deal with marketing people, not end users...
Regardless, there are basically no rules governing flash "sites". One noteable drawback is that the state is not bookmarkable. That kind of site is inappropriate to include in a search engine, as end users expect a click on a link from a search engine to take them to a page relevant to their search. Users' preference for glitzy "mmm, shiny" sites which are more easily done in Flash (anything relevant in flash can be done with DHTML and javascript, and I'd prefer it that way for a variety of reasons) don't translate to users' preference in serch engine functionality.
For what it's worth, if you're using flash to play video, fine. The description of the video should be on the page somewhere in text so I can copy and paste it, or search for it in a search engine. If you're using flash for a game, the text should be on the page somewhere so I can copy and paste it. The developer doesn't have to throw away all use of HTML beyond the <object> tag just because he's using Flash. And yes, I've worked with Flash sites for paying customers often - once the customers were informed as to the benefits and drawbacks of totally flash design (unbookmarkable state is a big drawback, quicker development of a consistent interface is a benefit, etc), they usually decided not to go that way. The ones that didn't were the same ones that didn't care about usability or general functionality in other areas...
Bollocks. If you design your web site in such a way to properly and openly reflect your business or whatever, no problems.
Bollocks again. Its a censorship of a sort and not at all acceptable. Google is misusing the power that millions of users have empowered google with. Now that they have manipulated the pagerank, users searching for the site are also punished as the usual result is not shown. Google should just deduct the point from pagerank that were obtained illegetimately. Not to zero its rank as a punishment. Google should not punish its users for the actions of some site that they want to illegitimately gain points. A search engine should be sensitive on both the ends.
Power eventually destroys a dictator. Doesn't it? Google should stop being a dictator or count its days.
You're being quoted in some papers btw...
0 6
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/35836
Google just tested and demonstrated their power and influence, whether they realize it or not. Most websites, especially businesses like BMW wouldn't do nearly as well as they wish to if they wern't listed in Google.
People like you and I love Google because it makes our lives much easier and more fulfilling, so we continue to use their service, which is how they will eventally take over the internet.
OMG Buy even more shares!
Well by golly you're right. Many thanks for the tip.
Is it fascism yet?
That's how long it took bmw.de to get back to the top of :
s pell=1
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bmw+germany&
But what if those people in China want to have a Lemon Party?!
Getting nailed for something that is thechnically incorrect is one thing but to get nailed for a trivial political thing is another. On this particular forum we are for the most part technically inclined. The politics should be such a minor issue as to not influence the mod points. What I said was probably reasonably intrepretadted as political in nature but your response in exercising negative points seems uber excessive. Simply tell me to piss off--that would have sufficed.