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"
At first I thought this was going to be yet another "SearchKing"-like whine with cheese about how unfair Google was being to some sleazy parked domain hoarder. But that's not quite the case. Make sure you RTFA. I think the guy's website is relatively useful and well-organized. It sure doesn't feel like the usual AdWord gaming scheme.
I get the sense that Google is being hoisted by its own petard here. The fact that the article mentions the site in question might be in direct competition with one of Google's main partners is definitely interesting, coupled with the allegation that he knew of at least one other website who got a pass from the algorithm after being evaluated by a human being.
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. Now run the same search directly into Google. See the problem? Yeah, the 5th hit is a Runescape page, for cryin' out loud. I'm sure I could possibly refine the search, but think about the ads that show up on the right side of the page. A link to Sourcetool and five seconds later I'm looking at what I actually needed.
Maybe Google is nervous about niche search solutions? I'm just not seeing their problem here.
If the article is correct, Google is not acting on good faith. To all the people who screamed about how Google is not a monpoly and made Microsoft jokes when Slashdot ran the Yahoo deal antitrust investigation, remember that Google does have more than 70% of the online ad market, and then put yourself in this guy's position. What are your options? MSN ads? You're screwed, because you can't take your business elsewhere.
And I have to say I was astounded at the money amounts mentioned... $600K per month? I'm definitely in the wrong business!
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Does a company have a right to revenue? If they base their business model on the rules of another company, do they really have recourse when the rules are changed to damage that revenue stream?
And can anyone point me to a bit torrent of an actual Miley Cyrus CD instead of garbage binaries?
Making a long list of websites containing a specific phrase is fairly trivial. Finding interesting ones among that set, or in other words, picking winners and losers, is the reason Google (and other search machines) exists at all.
So yes, they damn well should be doing that.
Now, if only they would get rid of those annoying sites that offer "$HARDWARE? Prices, reviews, and benchmarks! Be the first to write a review!"...
If
The Google rules are:
1) well understood
2) documented
3) Non-arbitrary
I'm sure google will be able to defend them in court.
However, whenever I hear people discussing them, 2) is not true, on the argument that they would be gamable otherwise.
I predict a loss for Google. Without documentation they can't prove they're not arbitrary. If they're arbitrary, they're acting like a monopoly and need to be struck down. From "do no evil" to "do the only evil that's actually explicitly forbidden by law for a company". It's quite a drop
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?
That's an AdWords arbitrage site, one that buys cheap clicks to get traffic and sells expensive clicks to its own advertisers. Such sites are just another form of webspam. When Google raised their minimum bid for ads on search, many of those bottom-feeders dropped out, and ad clutter was reduced. Google revenue went down, too, but may recover in time.
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?
But it shouldn't be up to a search engine to decide what is interesting or not.
Bullshit. Why are you the great arbiter, the Great Decider, on what a search engine should be?
Not to mention, that is exactly what search engines do--they sort through the more relevant (which are the "interesting"--links most of interest) first through algorithms for relevancy and traffic.
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.
Please, PLEASE allow us to check a box in our settings that gets us to the "real" search results, Google.
Name it something innocous, like [] Remember the Good Old Days
In fact, do that now, please - checking the box will remove Expert Sexchange, cnet, pricerunner, etc. etc. from the search "results"
[the list that givemebackmygoogle is a good start for the block list]
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
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)
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.
...has morphed into a "pay to play" scam, where you either pony up what Google demands, or else choose not to do business with Google. I've used AdWords for a couple of years now. This past year, I've noticed a disturbing trend: When I select relatively obscure (but valid) AdWords, with low CPC traffic estimates, it takes about a day before Google exponentially increases the price -- sometimes by a factor of 10, even more. And here's the kicker: Google does not give you the choice of paying to rank "in the middle of the pack". Instead, it's all or nothing: Either pay the exorbitant price tag Google now demands for the number #1 slot, or don't run your keywords at all.
This makes sense, in that it ensures that Google can take in maximum revenue for each keyword, rather than varying levels based upon what customers are willing to pay. As is to be expected from a publicly-traded company seeking to maximize shareholder value.
As a small business owner, I simply can't compete with (1) the click fraud that's rampant in AdWords, (2) the ability of well-heeled businesses such as eBay to bid up random AdWords to excessive CPC values, and (3) legitimate companies who can afford the number 1 AdWord slot for a keyword.
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).
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[...]
The answers -are- there, just scroll down past the point that mentions subscription and you'll find them. If scrolling is "an annoyance and a pain", try hitting the End key...
I used to do that, but I tried that the other day, and it didn't work. I am looking for answers, not to play games with that website.
Did you bother to actually look at sourcetool.com? Multiple keywords, all unrelated to each other, each with the same anchor tag. He's a whiner.
Dog is my co-pilot.
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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Allow me to address briefly the two principal charges against Sourcetool: (1) that we are an arbitrager and (2) we are a link farm. Regarding the first point, I would argue that anyone conducting an online business these days is a arbitrager in that they hope to make more money on a visits to their site â" or on the repeat visits â" than it costs them to get people to their site. Even an ecommerce site is conducting a form of arbitrage. Unfortunately, with Google being the only game in town, we either have to figure out how to appear in the organic results â" which is virtually impossible for any directory other than Google Local â" or buy ourselves traffic from AdWords. While a handful of consumer websites might be able to capture word of mouth buzz and build an audience outside of Google, that is virtually impossible for B2B sites, the vast majority of which are lucky to get 100 visits a day. Most of my competitors in the business to business space charge companies for their position in their organic, which by the way is a much more profitable way to generate revenue on B2B site than running AdSense. I decided to do things in a very transparent way, clearly labeling the AdSense ads which made it much more obvious how I made money. The arbitrage issue dovetails into the link farm issue. How and when does a site become a link farm? Is Google a link farm because all of its results lead directly to other websites? In fact, 26 percent of the time people visit a Sourcetool result page, they click on an ad, which, by the way, is almost identical to Googleâ(TM)s organic to paid listings ratio. I invested $400,000 trying to get my organic results right. During the first 2 years, ironically, I paid Google $200,000 to license five Google Search Appliance services so that I could get the ordering of the listed businesses based on Googleâ(TM)s enterprise page rank. More recently, Iâ(TM)ve obviously been forced to cut costs and am using the open source SOLR search software to order the results. The NY Times reporter told me that Google complained that Sourcetoolâ(TM)s results led to a company profile page, rather than directly to the company website, something Google never mentioned to me in spite of numerous conversations on the topic. If I did that, I would be much more of a link farm than I am. In fact, I have invested well into six figures profiling the companies listed in Sourcetool and gathering the information that could be useful to a business buyer. Itâ(TM)s easy to throw around terms like link far and arbitrager, but itâ(TM)s demeaning to entrepreneurs who are honesty trying to build a valuable service. Clearly, Sourcetool.com could be a better site, and, if Google hadnâ(TM)t cut us off, we would be a much better site today. During our peak traffic days, we were receiving hundreds of company profiles each day, many from the emerging B2B companies in China. We had hoped to introduce videos of factory walkthroughs so buyers could visit plants without getting on a plane. But all of this takes money, and why would you invest money in a business that is controlled by somebody else who has proven to be a highly unreliable business partner.