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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."
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"