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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?
One of the greatest annoyances of Google (to those of us techies searching for answers) is "Expert's Exchange". Google gets to see the answers, but anyone searching for those answers doesn't get them, but is told to sign up and pay money for a "premium subscription".
There are ways around this, but this is all an annoyance and a pain to deal with, because the answers are readily and freely available on the Internet, and they would be much easier to find if the search results weren't clogged up with this type of garbage result.
So why aren't they in the "doghouse" too? (while we're at it, It would be great to move all the scientfic access-for-pay journals to a separate "scientific" google while we're at it -- they end up being half the results of my searches sometimes, but at least they aren't the tease that the EE site is)