Casualty of Penguin - Diversity (vs a privileged club of few)

[McMohan]

Penguin, with all its good intentions ensures -

1. SERPs are getting more resistant to any hint of manipulation

2. Only sites that gain links naturally are rewarded. In other words, sites that command authority, visible offline and online and are brands.

3. Sites grow organically and with time, not before their time

4. It is Branding, PR, Advertising and Promotion that is the new SEO, not SEO by itself. A great product/service may or may not really count, unless that product is in a less competitive niche.

5. Size matters - A monster of a portal that stocks 101 product range will hold an upper hand as against a single-product niche site. Economies of scale.

6. The bigger and popular a site grows or a brand is, chances of it being white-listed is more, making that site rank perpetually and immune to SEO mistakes and competitor sabotage.

All this is fine and helps ensure Google is not a battlefield of SEO manipulations. But how does the other side of the coin look like?
Are you seeing more of the same sites that didn't need a Google to know about or could we well have used just a site search? Are we able to unearth smaller but interesting ecommerce sites from where we can buy stuff that you don't see in every second household?

Could we have an Authority Filter just as we have an Adult Filter?

[lucy24]

Past threads about the confusion between search box and address bar (not including the particularly hilarious post I was searching for, but oh well):

[webmasterworld.com...] (2006) *

[webmasterworld.com...] (2008)

[webmasterworld.com...] (2011, w/ particular attention to OP)

and
:: drumroll ::

[webmasterworld.com...] (2006, but note topic title)


* Anyone know who Adam Lasnik is? Back in 2006-2007 he apparently was Google's voice on this forum.

[JD_Toims]

* Anyone know who Adam Lasnik is? Back in 2006-2007 he apparently was Google's voice on this forum.

He was one of a number of Googler's who posted here "back in the day". IIRC he was involved in search quality in some way, but don't remember exactly. [The conversation I remember him most involved in was about keeping/dropping the little green pixels of "Google Dust" assigned to each page in the ToolBar -- Maybe nearly a decade after a number of people here made some good arguments for it being removed they're actually getting ready to do it?]

We also had GoogleGuy [MCutts] and Vanessa Fox who posted around the same time, but they're long gone from sharing info here these days.

[EditorialGuy]

Anyone know who Adam Lasnik is? Back in 2006-2007 he apparently was Google's voice on this forum.

He was one of a number of Googler's who posted here "back in the day". IIRC he was involved in search quality in some way, but don't remember exactly.

He's still at Google, and you can find him on Google+.

[diberry]

EditorialGuy, I really don't know how you extrapolated that I was telling searchers to do anything. I was saying it might behoove the engines to make distinctions about whether searches are coming via the URL bar or elsewhere. But maybe it wouldn't yield significant patterns. What I do feel sure of is that it's throwing off the algo's perception of what people want. Which apparently was what they wanted, since they were not exactly absent as browsers were developing this way. Some don't even offer a search bar anymore. This may be an attempt to provide a good user experience, but it may also be confusing the algorithm.