walkman - 11:28 am on Sep 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

If you have repeatable empirical evidence that Google is "manipulating" (whatever that means, it would be nice to have a definition) search results to increase adwords revenue, that would be interesting.

Other than what awall19 said, SERPS change so how do I know why? It's all secret, not even impartial parties are allowed to inspect it AFAIK. But I have empirical evidence and anyone with a braincell knows that a lot of what G is saying is BS.

First G already admits of manually inspecting and consequently changing top keywords. Even Matt Cutts admitted that there's a lot of hand tweaking now vs the old days. Oh but they are checked by raters using "science" that Amit Singhal is fond of saying. Really? You can get them to vote either way, any pollster knows [en.wikipedia.org...] . And that's even if the criteria was $$ blind, which it isn't sinces what we have seen mentions or hint at brands quite a few times.

The result seems to be that for many top commerce terms the top results also have adwords ads at the same time, so Google doesn't lose and it takes care of it's 'ecosystem'. One hand washes the other.

What's better for "Insurance" ? A site that gives you a choice of 4-5-10 quotes or a list of major insurance companies (with billions to spend a year and just so happened to be G advertisers?) Does anyone believe that that term was left to chance? But the algo did. Yeah, sure, after it was tweaked to do exactly what Google wanted it to do it.

I'll ask these questions:
Does anyone believe that an algo that hurts Google earnings would stay ? Yes, different SERP results can make the ads look better or worse. When was the last quarter Google lost or made less money? Or is an algo that makes more money always the most relevant one :)?

Or Google leaves that to chance too? We will learn a lot about Google once private documents are going to be examined. For some it will be worse than when they found out that Santa Claus didn't exist. Google's corporate 'ethics' are do it, and hope not to get caught. They attempted to steal the copyright from book owners (they can let us know if they disagree was their answer. HUH?) and then knowingly chose to steal from Java and take their chances, IF they got sued later. We know about the drug ad deal thing, where they even risked jail for very little money, relatively speaking. This shows unlimited and contempt for anything and anyone but their profits.

Hell, maybe they change your site's title on the fly to make it suck so people click on ads. It's not like 'they wouldn't do such a thing,' or that they can't, and ads are part of search. Who cares if a user got what he/she wanted by clicking on an ad vs an organic listing? No one but Google's shareholders and the loser site-owner.