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Google Punishing Chrome Results For 60 Days
djl4570 writes "'Google is pushing its own Chrome browser down in search rankings for 60 days following reports that the company was involved in an ad campaign that paid for links to bolster search traffic. ... According to Sullivan, it appears that Google contracted its Web ads out to a firm called Essence Digital, which in turn asked a company called Unruly Media to implement the campaign.' I see this as an astute move on Google's part. Rather than circle the wagons they say 'oops' and correct the problem. Google understands that such link pimping is a cancer that undermines the integrity of their search engine. That's why it isn't allowed and now Google is saying we don't support a double standard either."
Feeling...positive...feelings...towards...billion dollar...corporation...must search for...negative...feelings...for another...corporation...!
The article that I had read yesterday suggested that they were going to wash their hands of it and blame the bloggers.
I am happy to see the fair business practice here. I do not always like what you're up to Google, but sometimes, like with mostly pulling out of China, and now this, I like what I see.
...and they're getting so much press in the news for doing so that the net result is much more promotion than Chrome would have seen otherwise. GENIUS!
Better known as 318230.
I wouldn't have expected this level of integrity from any other company. There's been a lot of opinions floating around that Google aren't 'good guys' any more than others, but cases like this show that they really are different.
I just pay for some banner and report that to Google ?
The article mentioned the results for Bing and Google, so I decided to do a little investigation. If you search for "browser" on Bing, the top 10 results are quite similar, with one notable absence - no Firefox or Mozilla pages appear. Does this seem fishy to anyone else?
Like cheering a guy on when he stops beating his wife.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I am not sure if this is a good marketing/political move on Google part. They demonstrate to the whole world how easy it is for them to "alter" search results. So today they choose to alter it one way, but what prevents Google to do it other way tomorrow?
How was this moderated up? It's incomprehensible. What is the antecedent of "it" in "just do it"? At first I thought it was "behave nicely" (i.e., "adhere to standards") but then the rest of the comment makes zero sense.
For me, it was the fact that the only Chrome plugin that enables Vim-like keybindings sucked, so I went back to Firefox with Pentadactyl.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
...... was convincing the world he didn't exist. ~ Charles Baudelaire, "The Generous Gambler" (Feb. 1864)
This is just good PR as this article is proof of concept!
People refuse to see the obvious and look from their boat over the water service, but they never look what is actually in the water! People often do not like the reality and truth cause it is too negative too live with! And that is ignoring the problem! Which again makes them part of it! ^^
What is the antecedent of "it" in "just do it"?
Cheat until caught.
another major multinational conglomerate
What's the name of this major multinational conglomerate?
Sounds great. Looking at it raises a couple of questions though: 1) When are they going implement this? Googling 'Chrome' from machines in Switzerland, Miami and Chicago still gives the 'Download and install Google Chrome' link in the prime position. 2) Wouldn't any other company have been banned and have to resubmit?
Google has 20,000 employees and their primary business is advertising -- 98% of their revenue, many billions of dollars every year, comes from advertising. So why would Google need to hire another company to advertise their Chrome browser? And why did *THAT* company need to hire *ANOTHER* company?
When you want to do something dodgy, while pretending to "do no evil", what better way than to hire someone else to do your dirty work for you. And when they get busted, you can just blame them and say "Hey, we didn't know anything about it".
Google has always maintained that their search results are totally unbiased and not influenced by ad sponsors, the companies other businesses, and anybody trying to spam the system. This seems like an internal dispute between the search team and the Chrome team...
Maybe.
But keep in mind that many corporations don't present a unified face to the public. Or maintain a consistent internal corporate culture. It may very well have been one rogue employee (or department) that got it in their head to bump up their own product's ranking. And someone else stepped in and corrected them. Stuff like this happens all the time. The speed with which they admit and correct their own errors is the sign of a healthy corporate culture (of course, the guilty party might have been transferred to their IE6 support group).
Try working for a company where the culture is broken, or co-opted by various internal factions. And management is powerless to fix the problems. That's when the cancer has set in. Pretty soon they aren't fighting for the company any more (ethically or not). Everybody is cutting side deals with vendors, taking their stock options, and otherwise trying to feather their own nest.
Have gnu, will travel.
We got caught. Google assumed they were the only ones in a position to recognize their deception. They were wrong.
What's crappy about Chrome's XHR support? Are you referring to this? http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=35705
(Browser geek. Genuinely interested)
Chrome intentionally doesn't allow the blocking of ad resources before they are downloaded, which cripples AdBlock Plus. This is likely so Google can still report "ad views" to its advertisers. Combined with the bundling of the closed Flash plugin after all the talk about openness when they removed H.264 support, I lost interest in Chrome.
"Sufferin' succotash."
"Do no evil is a load of crap."
-Steve Jobs
That's OK, Chrome now has a memory footprint just like Firefox's, and if you google around you can find lots of examples of people complaining that it is now just as [un?]responsive as Firefox. I haven't confirmed this personally but people I "talk" to most days on G+ and FB have done so. So there is really no reason to give a crap about Chrome any more...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Day 61 back to normal?
Yep, you remember when Steve Jobs said "Do no evil is a load of crap"? He was absolutely correct about Google.
will they go back to manipulating results after this two month face saving period? Google-san - what say ye?
Yeah, none.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
News at 10. Google gets paid by advertisers for ad clicks, not ad views.
but what about the chrome ad, that I see every time when I search in your search engine for "browser" or similar? HOW exactly is this NOT evil?
Get over it Google, you thrive in an inherently evil system, the advertising system (ie giving to thhe people with money, more money by deceiving ignorant/lo IQ people). You put the rich first in your results. Just placing them in a slightly different background and under a faint "advertisement" banner, its a good thing, but doesn't relief you from the burden of sin. In the end, everyone with a common sense can understand that the advertisements indirectly are affecting the pagerank.
I think this has a little more to do with security than anything else. Whether the Ad is loaded or not it's hidden so that a user CANNOT click it and therefore Google does not get paid. Worst it looks like an impression with no clicks unlike Firefox you don't get the impression but you also don't get the click which is better for stats as far as Google goes.
News at 10. Google gets paid by advertisers for ad clicks, not ad views.
You're being ignorant. Google gets paid for impressions if they're image ads or video ads.
Gee, what a surprise. Search for "browser" on Bing, and Chrome's homepage is hit #72. Well ahead of it are highly relevant things like: Netscape (I kid you not, a link to Netscape's home page is #8, on the first page ... who knew it was even still around??); that the BOLT browser is discontinued; Zac, a specialized browser for autistic children (surely a worthy effort, but more relevant than Chrome?); Orca (the browser variant, not the aquatic variant); blog articles about people browsing in bookstores and grocery markets; etc. etc.
... sometimes, it's not that bashing MS is so fun, it's that they make it so easy.
IE's home page is hit #6 in Bing. (I'm actually surprised it wasn't higher). By the time you get to the Chrome homepage link, you've read 4 articles on how IE9 use is growing faster than Chrome use. It's not until link #76 that there's an article whose main point is that Chrome use growing.
Search on Google for "browser", and IE's home page is hit #8, right in the mix with Firefox, Opera, Safari.
Hmm
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38587742
The /g/ joke came true.
Google Chrome is technically a good browser. The marketing folks are to blame. Firefox got its market share mostly through word of mouth with very few adverts such as the New York times advert back in 2004. Meanwhile Google is making very cringeworthy adverts such as the Justin Bieber one and the Hatsune Miku one in Japan. I hope Google decides to compete on technical merits from now on and tone down the adverts. A web dominated by Chrome would be just as bad as one by IE.
It seems to me that this would be a great way for Google to appear innocent of cooking their search results to favor their own products and services, as implicated by Senators calling for an anti-trust investigation of the company. By making this "mistake", they appear as though they are neutral to their own algorithms and must employ the same efforts as any other company to optimize their placement in their own search results, whether this is genuinely true or not. It seems to me that this self-imposed punishment will cost them a whole lot less than an anti-trust battle or any court orders resulting from one.
It's Don't be evil, not do no evil.
Dilbert RSS feed
Google's campaign was not to acquire links for the purpose of manipulating search results. In fact, the campaign itself did not solicit links at all. The campaign was for video advertisements. Website publishers would get paid when one of their viewers watched the video about Chrome. Some of those publishers decided to add a link to Google Chrome on the same page. They received no additional money for including the link. They were not directed to include the link.
I understand why Google would devalue links like this, but penalize a website for it? When they didn't ask for the link at all, much less pay for it? That is ridiculous.
The search UI is weak sauce and getting weaker. The only app UI that is any good is Maps. (Which is very good - those guys should run the company!) Postini totally sucks. And now they are enforcing a moronic password policy on Google accounts - "Please use a password you haven't already used." Derrr. The pointy hair count is rising in Mountain View!
Social Credit would solve everything...
Yep, that's the one.
The main problem is that it's currently impossible to send binary data via XHR in Chrome without it getting eaten. What appears to happen is that everything gets "encoded" in UTF-8, which obviously is going to be a dog's breakfast. Even when using a BlobBuilder I just could *not* prevent things getting eaten when passing to xhr.send().
Firefox has a xhr.sendAsBinary() method that "just works". Nothing more needs to be said. Use xhr.sendAsBinary() instead of xhr.send() and all your problems are gone overnight. Oh, except for the fact that sendAsBinary() is non-standard and not supported in Chrome.
I ended up choosing the latter of two workarounds: using FileReader.readAsDataURL() (which encodes into base64) and unpacking the data: URL on the remote end, or using a FormData() object and using FormData.append() to place my File inside there.