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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?
You could at least add a link to the blog entry you mention. Like, say, this one.
Sheesh.
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.
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...
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."
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.
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!
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.
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.)
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
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.
...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.
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.
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
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?
The proper way to boost your site is to use descriptive text in the body of your page, use descriptive and accurate "alt" tags (for text browsers), add proper meta data to your page, as well as advertise or share links with relevant sites...
I'm not fat, just big boned...
"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.
Simple. You have a normal page that your users see. When the Google spider reaches your site, you serve him a special baked page full of keywords. How would you do it? Simple, just check who's accessing your site. Google plays nice, the 'bot always check ROBOTS.TXT first, and also, its IP can always be resolved to a hostname like somerobot.google.com.
So BMW was cheating - they detected that Google was coming, and served such a page (also known as a "doorway page" in SEO business. Simple as that.
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
...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
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.
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.
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.
No, it is because google is a very smart search engine.
Fight Spammers!
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 ?
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.
Google 's job is to search and report what it finds, not to act as the earth's police!
Google's job is to get me useful information.
This makes Google's interests and my interests very well aligned.
The job of SEOers is to prevent me from getting useful information. Google just sent a severe smack out towards people using SEOers. I'm cheering all the way.
Tell you what. You don't like it, you can go set up a search engine that *advocates* abuse by SEOers, and try and get people to use that. Have fun.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I'm willing to bet it's company policy to disallow Google employees from posting on places like slashdot - and specifically slashdot. =D
$signature_views++;
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.
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.
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.
You said it yourself: google isn't a directory service. Nobody pays to be included. Google can exclude a site for a number of reasons, which are all easily accessible on their site. Is says specifically that websites which do not adhere to the rules may be removed from the index.
When you search for something innoculous and get porn back, or one of those useless link farms, it is because of techniques like this. Maybe BMW was using them for good purposes, maybe not. Tough luck. They did something wrong, their pagerank was set to zero, as it should be. It's what I'd want to see happen to the porn and the link farms, it's what I'd want to see happen to anyone else who tried the same low, deceptive tricks.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
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
> 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
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.
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!
You do realise BMW is a German company and selling a quarter of their cars at home, don't you?
www.bmw.com is a portal, with links to invertor relations and so on. You can get to the country sites from there, and the international site happens to be available in German, but generally, using your local country domain directly will take you to a consumer site, in your langue, with localised pricing. Consumers usually expect a big company to have a local version of their site.
Anyway, this is about search results, not the location bar. Linked sites on bmw.de will simply not show up.
Oh wait...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Would you say they have been "degoogled"?
Or "ungooglable"?
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
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
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 ?
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.
Sounds like fraud to me.
Amazon's homepage currently seems to be a redirect to a different page (which is another redirect). That last page contains a unique identifier in the title. This behavior probably interacts poorly with Google's ranking algorithm (since "nobody" links to a page with a unique identifier in the path), just as a guess.
. html
$ telnet www.amazon.com 80
Trying 207.171.175.29...
Connected to www.amazon.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2006 05:07:51 GMT
Server: Server
Set-Cookie: skin=; domain=.amazon.com; path=/; expires=Wed, 01-Aug-01 12:00:00 GMT
Location: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain
Connection closed by foreign host.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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.
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"
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 ?
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
"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. ;)
That is the dumbest comment I have ever seen on Slashdot. Do you have any clue as to how Pagerank works? Just a hint, what users click on has nothing to do with it.
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?
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.
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?
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;
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If you search bmw deutschland, the third result is www.bmwfs.de, a redirection to bmw.de. Google didn't block this one...
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
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;
Jeez. If you don't like it, use a different Search Engine. /Mad
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
"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.
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
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.