Slashdot Mirror
The Gray Areas of Search-Engine Law
pasquafa writes "Here is a very smart article on the future of search engine legal controversies. Let's just say that the Google book search is just the start of the problems! Google
thinks it's a newspaper and wants First Amendment protection to do whatever it pleases."
Google is the printing press and library of the digital age. I need information, I can get it. Of course, politicians alike don't mind subjected the masses to near communist levels of taxation, but the second 'we the people' want to cash in on other fringe benefits of such an ideology, they get all up in arms about it. As much as I dislike the thought of a corporation running rampant outside of the boundaries of the law, I can't see who it is hurting.
And don't reply the 'author', because I see the quality of what kind of material your average author is either forced to create or otherwise, at the supermarket: Utter crap. Google books helps me find Noam Chomsky's material in a flash, ironic that I would have to pay for 'Imperial Ambitions', don't you think?
wow, that was rather rantish.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
i think the submitter assumed you'd be thinking along the lines that they were, since they mentioned Google books.
if they would just change the imaginary property laws to be only five years, google wouldnt have any problems with google books and it might get people to read more. i know a lot of people who have never read an entire book and it would be nice if the things had as much of a chance to be seen as the kid getting knocked down by a basketball on youtube.
i dont see the point in creating so much art that so few have easy access to. and dont bother mentioning libraries unless you can run around and check every book at the speed of light like google could.
SEOs are very good at getting pages to the top of Google's listings for a few days, then to the bottom of their listings for a few years.
FWIW, we do buy ads, but that's not the point. Many people ignore the paid ads on something like Google and just look at the 'proper' listings.
It is quite common for companies to have a working business one day, and then the next, for some unknown reason their site is now listed on page 972 of Google's results, so their business goes down the chute.
This happens because Google change some arbitrary parameter - eg they may now say that they'll treat two duplicated words in the title of any page on a site as spam. So, when Slashdot publishes an article 'Scientific American says that red squirrels prefer red meat', suddenly all of Slashdot disappears from their listings.
It probably wouldn't happen to Slashdot, but that's *probably*. If it did, no one would have any way of finding out why, and fixing it.
But the advantage would be minimal.
Money will always give an advantage - with Google, I can buy for ads to be put at the top/side of the search results page. So, money gives me an advantage.
All my 'ideal' would give would be a general explanation of why a search ranking is low, NOT an improvement in the search ranking.
Page ranking might be "neutral" (not directly affected by anyone at Google), but it's not that simple. If you repeat words, your ranking will drop. If you have duplicated sites, your ranking will drop, if you have lots of links to places with unrelated content, your ranking will drop.
I'm not suggesting that would change. I definitely wouldn't want the exact algorithms to be described by Google. But, being able to have someone give *general* feedback on why a page's ranking has dropped would give a bit more transparency. There would have to be a charge, or people would do it trivially, and Google would get snowed under with requests. There would have to be safeguards to try to stop people doing lots of requests with minor changes to try to reverse engineer Google's algorithms.
I see so many people who want their sites to be the number one result on Google.
;).
But 99.999999% of these shouldn't even be in the first page.
I bet hardly any of them can give a good reason why their site should be on the first page. They will say stupid stuff like "I want to make more money".
I don't swear often, but guess what, if that's the sort of reason they give, _I_ don't want their FUCKING sites ever appearing in my search results.
These bunch are usually the same breed as spammers - they want to make more money even (especially?) if it makes life worse for a lot of people.
You want to sell stuff? Fine. Have pages listing your products (specs and manuals would be nice if applicable) and prices AND the type of currency the prices are in (e.g. USD, EUR, GBP, AUD etc). Please have a contacts page that actually has contact details, not some stupid webform (which just makes me think you're either incompetent and/or a spammer). Please also state other important information like whether you are US only, or Texas only, what sort of payment is accepted. And please make sure that the same url doesn't keep showing completely different information - it's really annoying to see search results that appear promising, then click and get a totally different page. For example: yoursite.com/products/1423/ shouldn't show a different product the next month. Different prices maybe. If it's discontinued, mark it so, or remove it totally - don't reuse the url.
If I want to buy stuff that you sell, I want to be able to search and find you. If I'm trying to look for stuff that you don't sell, I don't want to find you.
If everyone gets to spam the results, that just makes it harder to find stuff.
After all if lots of people list stuff they don't provide just for the sake of appearing higher on the search results, that's rather annoying isn't it? Maybe even fraudulent in some cases. Shouldn't they get smacked way down for doing that?
But yeah maybe your idea isn't such a bad one. People get to pay $500, and then Google tells them "We think your site really sucks and that's why we've now moved it way below"