Slashdot Mirror
Stuck In Google's Doghouse
hansoloaf writes "The NY Times is running an article about a business, Sourcetool.com that seem to be in a sort of a doghouse with Google. Initially Sourcetool uses AdWords to help build up its business. The business centers around providing links for business that sell industrial products. The owner, Dan Savage, explains in detail how Google over time used its AdWords bidding system to limit or reduce Sourcetool's ranking and revenue because the site's landing page is not 'googly' enough. Savage wrote a letter to the Justice Department as they are reportedly looking into Google and Yahoo's proposed deal." The article is nuanced in its observations about the complexity and ambiguity of anti-trust law. Even if Sourcetool and similar businesses aren't "Googly" — which is a Google proxy for "what the customer wants to see in search results" — should Google be able to pick winners and losers among industries and business models?
But surely google must serve its customers in the way it deems best. Otherwise, who is running the business?
Solution? Make your website less like a link-farm. Perhaps add some value, like trustable reviews, or customer recommendations (otherwise, the site is not really any different to a Google search on the term "Industrial Products").
Which is, of course, why Google is the No.1 search engine. They make serving their customers their business, the crazy loons.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Does a company have a right to revenue? If they base their business model on the rules of another company, do they really have recourse when the rules are changed to damage that revenue stream?
And can anyone point me to a bit torrent of an actual Miley Cyrus CD instead of garbage binaries?
Making a long list of websites containing a specific phrase is fairly trivial. Finding interesting ones among that set, or in other words, picking winners and losers, is the reason Google (and other search machines) exists at all.
So yes, they damn well should be doing that.
Now, if only they would get rid of those annoying sites that offer "$HARDWARE? Prices, reviews, and benchmarks! Be the first to write a review!"...
So they're asking the gov't to determine whether Google has to highly rank link farms?
Yes, Google absolutely has the right to pick and choose results. They're the sole owners of their data and may present it any way they want. By what legal theory could that possibly be untrue?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
When I go to a search engine and ask it to find me something, I don't want to be taken to another search engine that might find me what I want. I want it to find me what I want.
More "oh look google is becoming evil!" nonsense. How exactly is it evil or "acting like Microsoft" to refuse over a half million dollars in revenue every month in order to prevent some lame ass site from annoying real users: the people who actually use the search engine to find information? People should try to use SourceTool before they draw any conclusions. I'm sure NOBODY would visit that site unless tricked into clicking on one of their ads. Don't you think if the site actually provided any real value, they could get plenty of visits through other means such as organic search listings?
I liked the article a lot too, and it's certainly true that someone who is operating a search business is in a tricky position. As I read it he grossed $650K monthly on click revenue, and paid Google $500K a month for keywords.
How much value is the site providing in between clicks? I searched it in a couple areas where I've had to find and buy materials or equipment. I would say not real useful, and far from complete. If you're seriously sourcing stuff for a business, you soon learn who the main manufacturers and distributors are, and if you google, you don't google for a broad category, but for a part number or the narrowest possible technical descriptor. Maybe if you're just starting out and with no idea who sells widget-grinders this would give you some initial places to look.
Other readers will be savvier on this, but the site really looks like it was generated by software with minimal human intervention. I certainly get no sense that experts in particular areas had any hand in making the categories. The guy's business model depends on being widely spread across a whole lot of categories, which pretty much precludes paying for the in-depth expertise that would make it really helpful.
A page of google search results is nothing but a link farm with some ads. This is like the old pot calling the kettle black. An individual does a single web page with topic-specific related links...that's the same thing google does, just they generate their's on the fly based on search words. I am not seeing any huge difference there with what the human sees on the screen once the browser renders it, it's a page with topic related links.
Here's an example. I searched for wood cutting on Sourcetool. That's a pretty relevant list of results if you're a business looking for that kind of equipment.
Except that every link is to a business.com redirector. Aside from the linkfarm site design going on, the redirect for every link is a big, spammy and red siren for me.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Google doesn't owe you a living. Deal.
We get these whiny search engine optimisation spammers on Wikipedia all the time. They don't go away.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
that sourcetool only made money when it was ranked highly on google suggests that it is in fact not useful enough for people to regularly use to find what they want, otherwise lower google rank should have only lowered the rate of growth.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
If they have nothing to sell to their customers, then they won't make very much money, will they.
But that's not how things work when you're a monopoly. Or even a company with only eighty percent of the market. Your product doesn't have to be ideal, just good enough to keep competitors from spending the billions of dollars and years of coding to even try to catch up. Google is now so big that their energy usage alone affects the budgets of entire counties. Looks to me like you're assuming that somehow if they don't do the best possible job, competition will somehow magically take care of it. That it's a choice between "nothing to sell" as you put it, and putting out a flawless product. Well, first of all, there's a huge range between "nothing" and "best". Secondly, when the barriers to entry are measured in billions of dollars and tens of thousands of programmer years of work, it's not realistic to expect that somebody will somehow just step in and supercede Google if they do something wrong.
Now, maybe you're thinking as you read this about Yahoo, MSN, and so on. Well, have you ever used their search engines in the past five years? I run web sites so I have to. They suck. I'm not even going to bother to explain why Microsoft would f*ck up a programming job; anybody posting here should get that already. But if you look at the others, they're somewhere between bush league and simply not built as general purpose search engines. Ask Jeeves and Yahoo are built for ignorant, clueless lumps who want everything explained to them in small words. Search on anything there and you'll reliably end up at sites with a fifth grade vocabulary and lots of "for dummies" style handholding.
What's my point? That their engines aren't even built to do what Google's does. To say that they still compete head to head with Google is like saying that Cliff Notes is competing with Encyclopedia Britannica. This means that in some ways, Google is already a monopoly and I'm willing to bet that the programmers in those companies who study how each other's code works would agree with me. They offer, superficially, the same product, but not to the same markets and not for quite the same uses.
Make no mistake; I use Google,too. Their results are fantastic. But just as I avoid posting links to Wikipedia, I go out of my way to find things in other ways than Google. As the article points out, power corrupts, monopoly power especially. And whether the folks in Google still believe after their cooperation with the Chinese government and their retention of personal data and so on that they are free from "evil" to use their own term, they will become a problem, a censoring, privacy infringing, overcharging danger to, quite literally, the entire human race if they keep going the way that they're going now.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
For Google to rank a business as "No.1" is no different from me saying that I hate Sears products.
Not true at all. When you decide, you do so mostly or entirely on your own behalf. Google's decisions affect hundreds of millions of people, not to mention that they present themselves as experts, in a new sort of way. And just as a civil engineer's opinion given to a client about cement makers is actionable while yours isn't, Google's "opinion" about a website is actionable. Ranking websites is what they do. They present themselves to the world as a content aggregator. That makes them fundamentally different from somebody deciding something about how they will spend their own money.
This is the opposite of "freedom". Realistically, they and a handful of other companies control the biggest pathways to a multi-trillion dollar market and you have to deal with them or one of a handful of others to get what has become a basic service. This is no more an example of "freedom" than choosing a broadband provider is.
This is also not "equality". Anybody going up against them is facing a corporation with more wealth, expertise, market position, and overall power than all but a few dozen in the world. If, say, the government of Sweden were to go up against Google, chances are Sweden would get their ass kicked. Same goes for, say, MIT or, as we've already seen, Microsoft. Anybody who can repeatedly publicly humiliate Microsoft isn't "equal" to anybody anymore.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
No. It only suggests that there continue to be plenty of people doing a given search for the first time. It's a big ol' world out there and you can be pretty damn good at what you do and not have everybody on the entire web already know about you and where to find you. On top of everything else, I've found that many people no longer bother to remember exactly the name of a site. They just remember enough to be able to find it with Google over and over and over. I've seen it done by people going to my own site, with me standing right there. They say, "okay, what's your site again? Something about streetcars and space and..." while they type into the Google window that's a default part of their browser. Using Google has become like a remote operated kind of type ahead or like bookmarking in many people's habits so sometimes even if a site is liked and used frequently, if it's not high up in Google's results, as far as many people are concerned, it will be gone.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
How is it any of the government's business how google ranks it's results? If google decided tomorrow to start ranking results from site:slashdot.org for no reason at all, is it not their place to do so?
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The sooner people realize that Google is not craigslist and has no reason to support anything that does not directly and positively affect its bottom line (thereby further enriching its shareholders), the sooner we'll get alternatives out there from companies and individuals who truly believe in enhancing usability and accessibility for the typical Internet denizen (read: you and me).
The second that Google stops being the best search engine is the second that I will stop using it. I don't care how Google manages its advertising, as long as I get the best results from my searching, and there is no one doing it better than Google atm. Here is the point, who are you to criticize Google's policies when they are doing the job better than anyone else?