Outside attempts to pressure google into changing its algorithm.

[aristotle]

Recently there was a brief discussion here about the possibility that pressures from the government might force (or induce) google to make certain changes to its ranking algorithm. Google must resist these pressures.

I've also read about a well-funded (but secretive) organized effort to flood the web with thousands of articles that promote a particular set of view, so that the sheer weight of numbers would overwhelm google's algorithm and create a bias toward those views. Google needs to protect its algorithm from this effort.

[edited by: goodroi at 1:23 am (utc) on Sep 15, 2018]
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[tangor]

On one hand g is the villain. On the other there are those who villainously game g! Sad state of affairs, but there it is.

Meanwhile, back at g hq "Sid, there's another batch of bogus coming out... set the dial..."

[goodroi]

Not sure I would call G the villain. I think it is more accurate to say they are an adversary to many.

Most large companies can be seen as good & bad at the same time because they do so many things simultaneously. For example, Google shows the suicide hotline phone number when someone searches for "how to kill myself" which has saved lives. Google has also not always made the best choices when it comes to China, privacy and many, many other things.

I think Google serps will continue to become more complicated as pressure from spammers, regulators and things we can't even imagine will increase in the future.

[iamlost]

Breaking news - SEO aka gaming SEs aka gaming Google actually works!

The concern being voiced, it's not new just more mainstream, is simply a variation of somebody else is ranking higher than me/my view.

What is new is the avalanche of partisan alternative views as society confronts a number of stress points.

With SEs', including Google's, algorithms primarily using various implicit popularity inputs whenever a concentrated group weighs in they can easily tilt results. The more tail the query space the easier to influence.

In one sense it's business as usual; in another the flaw/bug/feature in the underlying search algo assumptions is showing.

I expect that, just as in the past, G will make manual corrections while working to identify auto methods. Remember: the algo has no ability to 'know' or to 'reason' and no amount of ML will graft that on.

Things will likely get much worse or at least much broader across results before they get better. And a large subset of searchers will complain regardless of the outcome. Because people are idjits each in their own way, especially in their wilful ignorance, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy.

And, less we forget, companies are but the people behind the screen.

[JS_Harris]

I think Google serps will eventually give way in importance to voice searches that don't show websites at all but until then I don't think Google can be coerced into changing their algorithm itself, it's their property.

Gaming it on a huge scale is next to impossible. If you create a billion pages to try and make it think something false is fact they have different levels of checks and balances, including human reviews, and the spam team can nix all of them in one go. I would wager that Google will catch and stop these before the serps even update most of the time.

Food for thought. In an age where software exists to produce an unlimited number of variations of a page instantly Google would be getting ahead of that curve somehow. The next logicl step for Google is to be the content provider, but in voice.