Forum Moderators: open
When you read Google's explanation of PR [google.com], you get some haughty notion of the "uniquely democratic nature of the web," and how links translate into "votes." As well-intentioned as that may be, the reality of the online world is far closer the plutocracy of the physical world. With rare exceptions, economic interests rule above all else. Perhaps even more so online, since the only greater (arguably) motivating factor is largely irrelevent here: few should fear for their lives for actions they take on the internet.
Just as many authorities and governments are corrupted by economic interests, so too is the "authority" that Google relies on to generate its results. We've seen PR being bought and sold, outright spam turning into top SERP placement, the most relevent results buried under a mountain of rubbish, and SEO becoming the cottage industry of our time. Adwords seems something of an attempt to address this, to provide an outlet for economic interests and generate some revenue. But Adwords is a tiny release valve on the building pressure of a massive problem.
Anyone who has spent 1/10th as much time on SEO as content and user experience has only made things worse. And yet, SEO must be considered to remain competitive -- all the more so for commercial sites where people depend on the income generated.
Froogle seems the next step in a progression aimed to separate commercial and non-commercial sites. If Google believes this is the cure and diverts commercial listings from Google to Froogle, then the cure is surely much worse than the disease. Whole businesses would fold in the transition.
So how then does Google address our innate greed? What can possibly be done to restore the validity of search results without disrupting the online economy? Are progressive algorithm tweaks enough?
How can a handful of programmers overcome human nature?
Personally I don't care about "overcoming human nature". I prefer trying to deal with the limitations of one specific human being: me. In a Goggle context this means:
1. Trying to create good content for my websites.
2. Trying to create a good linking structure on my websites with relevant links to good pages, including my own.
3. Trying to make clean and lean code.
4. Trying to make a clean visual design.
My 25 øre.
Because of Google's position, most sites now only optimise for Google. There's a much greater understanding of what Google looks for in a page, how PageRank is an issue, Freshbot, penalties etc etc than a few years ago, and this leads to an army of SEOs working to enhance results.
In other words, Google is becoming a victim of its own success, and must constantly be engaged in a battle to keep the spam out of its listings which must be a HUGE drain on resources.
Think back to the heady days of AltaVista.. that used to be the pre-eminent search engine in much the same way as Google, but one of the things that helped kill it off was the ease of SEO for AltaVista's algorithm.
Ironically, more competition might help to take the pressure of Google in terms of spam. All algos are different.. some giving similar results (Alltheweb), some using radically different algorithms (e.g. Gigablast).
And no other search engine has its results open to as much scruting as Google. I bet GoogleGuy wouldn't mind sharing some of that pressure with TeomaGal or whoever :)
We do ourselves no favours when we emphasise the acquisitional aspects of 'human nature' to the exclusion of the altruistic elements.
I agree with your web-building priorities entirely. I'd like to think that humanity wasn't living through some nil-sum game in which the gain of one person translates into the loss of another.
- Ash
It's an algorithm, and they are obviously doing their best to make SERP's relevant with this algo, as are we in getting our sites ranked high.
Even if you complain about adwords, you can just "blame" the invisible hand of economics for not being democratic :)
I think there is room for everyone....just it takes some reading up for some of us to get there.
Wrong. Most of the WWW is informational, non-commercial sites. The concept of PR thus tends to work well for most of the web. The logic behind PR is such it doesn't work so well with commercial sites, because competitors don't tend to link to other competitors.
My own experience further conforms to this. I run a non-commercial web site that I put online less than two months ago. I haven't even been officially added to the Google index yet - I should be added in the next update, because my site has been thoroughly deep crawled now - but I'm already doing far better in the SERPs than I expected, and I haven't spent a dime to get there. Even if you count my AdWords expenditures, which I think have zero relation to the SERPs, my cost has been extraordinarily low. And I've actually shied away from a number of SEO techniques (I refuse to do link exchanges - I link to a site only if it's relevant to my content, and I expect other sites to do the same).
The web (and Google's algorithm) provides a natural feedback loop that keeps commercialism from taking over. Example: Widgets 'R Us.com spends $10 billion on a new advertising campaign, buying banner ads, links, and anything else they can. As a result, they end up as number one on the SERPs. So for a few months, they get a huge boost in traffic. But their site stinks, their service is horrible, and their prices are through the roof because they have to pay for their ad campaign. Meanwhile, Joe Bob sets up Widgets Express.com on his home computer with a $35 a year dynamic DNS domain name and a $50 per month cable modem. He builds a good site in his spare time, and spends $500 a month on AdWords. He takes the time to respond carefully to his customers, and he passes on his low operating costs to his customers via low prices.
After twelve months, Widgets 'R Us.com has spent all its venture capital and gone bankrupt. None of its customers have linked to it because the site is so horrible, and all the paid links have been removed because they can't pay anymore. They've dropped to page 20 in the SERPs. But Joe Bob's Widget's Express has exploded, because all of his customers have gone out and posted links to his great site, pushing him up to number one in the SERPs. Joe Bob has long since quit his day job, moved his site into a real office, and hired a staff to help him keep up with all his business.
This is an extreme example. It was meant to be, for the sake of clarity. But it illustrates a phenomenon that happens every single day on the internet. The reality is that because of its extremely low operating costs, the internet is the great equalizer. It really does give the little guy a chance to compete. Does it take a lot of work for David to beat Goliath? Absolutely. The internet didn't tilt the field in favor of the little guy - it just leveled it out for everybody.
Most of the WWW is informational, non-commercial sites. The concept of PR thus tends to work well for most of the web. The logic behind PR is such it doesn't work so well with commercial sites, because competitors don't tend to link to other competitors.
Perhaps, but then why are many keywords/phrases dominated by commercial sites? If such sites are a minority, then its seems even worse that they should be able to accomplish this.
It may be that any dominant search engine has a certain lifespan. The death knell sounds when people are able to engineer good SERPs for themselves, whether they buy them or not. I don't see anything rising up to challenge Google for the moment, nor do I see them making the changes needed to remain relevent.
Seems to me that your problem is not with Google but with the world that you are personally living in and the human beings that live in it with you. I live in a world very different from that, and I think that the people at Google do so too.
Sorry to interrupt your utopian fantasy. ;) Indeed I don't have a problem with Google...they've got no responsibility to the world. I do feel that they need to recognize how the world works and how they fit into it and respond appropriately if they are to continue as they have. I personally wouldn't mind if they never choose to address these problems as long as they can remain dominant. Many of us here can exploit their algorithms to great effect. For the folks at Google, it must be a constant struggle to change enough to limit exploitation without breaking what works about their system. I think to return better results and stay ahead of the exploitation they need to change a bit faster than their current rate, and I fear when they realize how things have degraded, they'll implement changes too drastic to recover from for many websites.
The constant stream of posts about de-listings and PR0 penalities for sometimes trivial missteps is ample evidence of their heavy-handedness. Indeed how can you give a personal touch to 3 billion web pages?
It is my impression that they understand fairly well how the world works and how they fit into it as a company and as a community and as individuals. And their responses are generally at a quality level that most companies might envy. GoogleGuy's posts at WebmasterWorld are just one example. Of course their search engine isn't perfect, but it is fulfilling its purpose to a degree that few pieces of electronic software do better.
> Sorry to interrupt your utopian fantasy.
?!? Utopian? Fantasy?
My perception of the world is built upon a life of uncompromising investigations of reallife experiences. It must be more than 10 years ago that it last met a test that gave me any difficulties. I wonder how many members can truthfully say that about themselves?
(I first wrote a comment that I decided not to post as it might hurt the feelings of persons whose feelings I certainly would not want to hurt. It might also be against the ToS. Anybody interested in reading that comment is welcome to sticky me.)
Thanks for the nice comments that have been given to my earlier post. And I must agree with ronin's and freejung's additions.
One person pisses in the pool and we all end up swimming in it. Google just isn't doing a good enough job of keeping the water clean. No one has charged them with this task, but it seems necessary to their goals.
If I sound at all bitter, I'll come out and say that I sell widgets, like many here, and do well with google. I personally don't have the time to worry about what google is going to do next, but I can't help but recognize the problems it faces. The web needs a huge infusion of balance and entropy. It has to be more than a marketplace to remain a viable marketplace, among its many other uses.
there's enough politicians and theorists in here to make their own search engine. :-)
looking at the title of the thread I'd guess so. or how about changing it to "is my karma the same as google", or something like that.
I get the feeling that if you want to discuss how democratic an algorithm is then there should be lots of maths on the table, because thats what its made of.
However, I guess I could agree that Google's results aren't quite as good as they used to be, but the culprit really isn't anybody in particular. I don't generally do anything search related, but as a programmer myself I have an appreciation of the magnitude of the problem Google faces, and I think that the real culprit is simple numbers. Google's database has simply increased in size - dramatically. In some ways, that gives it better results. A search for Widgets today turns up good sites that you wouldn't have found even a month ago. But in other ways, it degrades the results because that same search also turns up far more completely useless results.
It's not really the money vs. the informational - it's just statistics and probability.
There is more to doing well in Google than just PR. PR is worth less today then it ever has in the past. Commercial sites are the ones likely to be heavily SEOed. Amateur sites tend not to bother. Heck, amateur sites often are so badly SEOed they don't have the obvious keywords in the page title, etc.
haughty notion of the "uniquely democratic nature of the web"
I think that far from being 'haughty' this message is intended to give the less tech-savvy visitor (i.e. nearly all of Google's searchers) an idea of how Google ranks pages. It doesn't seem to me to be a statement of intent, or a political theory about Google's results. They say "uniquely democratic nature of the web" not of the search results. To me, this is just the simple idea that anyone can make a website to say what they want, without incurring the huge costs etc. that would be necessary to get the same exposure offline.
It is easy for webmasters to hang on and analyse everything Google say on their site and elsewhere, because of Google's importance. Nowhere on that page do Google say that their results are democratic.
The internet didn't tilt the field in favor of the little guy - it just leveled it out for everybody.
