Federal Legislation Proposed to Stop Google Preferencing Itself

[Brett_Tabke]

In one of the more interesting stories this week for SEO's about Google, a proposed law would make it illegal for Google to preference Google destinations.

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers ... proposed five bills Friday designed to dilute the power of the largest tech platforms—one of them tackling an issue brought to light by a Markup investigation.

The American Choice and Innovation Online Act... would prohibit certain large tech platforms from favoring their own products and services on their platforms, including in search results.

[themarkup.org...]

[superclown2]

Here's hoping, but it will take years in the face of Google's 'lobbying'. I'd rather rely on Europe, things get done much more quickly over here.

[NickMNS]

The legislation centers around this claim:

This quote from the article was from hearing that took place last summer (2020)

“An investigative report published just yesterday found that 63 percent of searches that start on Google also end on Google’s own websites,”

The report from 2020 referenced in the quote, and linked in the article.
[themarkup.org...]

There is/was on going discussion here about zero-click searches
[webmasterworld.com...]

[NickMNS]

Let me add that I think that Markup's 2020 report is flawed.

It has an image of mobiles search results that allow you to scroll to the first organic result and then states that one needed to scroll down 36% of the page to get to it. This is flawed, because that number could be 10% and still have the same effect. All that is needed to reduce the percentage is to keep adding content below that first organic result, think infinite scroll, then you get a page of infinite length and an arbitrarily small % to scroll down.

Instead, take the height of the first organic result, then take the height of the page at which the result appears and then divide the height where it appears by the result height and you would get the theoretical number of results that came before. In this case (simply eyeballing it) you likely get 10 or 12 results. Which is the equivalent of being on page 2 of a traditional SERP.

[JS_Harris]

In my opinion Google isn't preferencing itself, they are preferencing the giving of your content to its users directly. There;s a difference. They are training AI to do so in fact(see M.U.M.), perhaps for a time when they give the answers in voice format and there are only legacy results pages left.

'Hey Google, what is such and such'
'Hi Mike, glad you asked, first we'd like to tell you about sales in your area"
"Just answer me, don't advertise"
"Oh, sorry Mike, this is a free service but only with ads or a subscription, would you like Legacy results instead?"

Anyway, I have no opinion on what has not been rolled out yet but I don't think anyone is blind to where google is going. The content creators who provided the learning materials for the AI should receive part of what Google makes from their content if they stop sending traffic entirely, IMO.

No matter how holistic the approach, monetary issues, for Google AND content creators, needs to be resolved first... not be an afterthought..

[superclown2]

I believe that Google is trying to phase out websites, or at least devalue them.

They have always stated that their aim is to organise the world's data. To them, websites are just one medium amongst many. They have been useful for a while in providing information for them to store and sort but now they have served their purpose. They are relegated to the bottom of the pile whilst Google gives instant answers and snippets of information that they have extracted from sites.

The problem with this theory is that much of the information they offer is incorrect, out of date or scraped from foreign websites. About half the details I see on the hated 'People Also Ask' are from American sites whilst I'm in the UK and so they are completely useless. The rest are from 'Authority' sites that spend heavily on Google ads but are by no means experts on the subjects they are providing answers for; the true specialists are too far down the pecking order for that.

It will be interesting to see what the public will choose as their favourite advertising agency (sorry, search engine) when they are presented with a real choice and not the default one on just about every browser in the universe.

Organising the world's information in this way may be good for Google's profits. Whether it is good for the public, businesses and innovation is a different matter altogether.

[heisje]

I am quite frustrated by the direction of discussion here : how Google this, how Google that. However, the fundamental resolution has been here before our very eyes for decades already : are we blind? it's called AT&T! Tried, tested and true - perfectly functional.

Google Search is in effect a *utility*. Consequently Search has to be split between universal *infrastructure* (i.e. servers and index, privately held but regulated) and *distribution* (i.e. presentation/display) by multiple service providers (privately held but regulated) free to deal with index as they please, at a usage fee, possibly including among others an independent subsidiary of Google.

End of story.

.

[NickMNS]

Google Search is in effect a *utility*.

We are putting the cart in front of the horse. Internet access isn't even considered a utility in the US and Canada. Let's start with that, then once the access is a utility then we can start talking about what services on that network should be regulated.

Oh don't forget about net-neutrality, yet another issue that would need to be resolved.

[JS_Harris]

After seeing the M.U.M. presentations it feels like Google is near ready to offer all knowledge via voice but i'm not seeing their plans for attribution in that.