Google responds to NY Times article by improving its algorithms

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html

by Matt_Cutts • 16 years ago

268 79 16 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

arman0• 16 years ago

This post is a great rebuttal to those who think that Google is becoming a lumbering giant. I wonder how long it would have taken Microsoft to respond to a similar situation.

kqr23• 16 years ago

One of the search terms mentioned in the NY Times articles was "Christian Audigier glasses". On Bing, the questionable www.decormyeyes.com site is still the 5th listing.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=Christian+Audigier+glasses&...

achille• 16 years ago

They're still the 4th result when searching for "discount designer sunglasses" -- so they have not been banned quite yet.

chollida12• 16 years ago

I don't see it in the bing search results anymore.

I guess the answer to how long would it take Bing to change is, about as long as it takes Google.

Encosia• 16 years ago

> I wonder how long it would have taken Microsoft to respond to a similar situation.

When ASP.NET's AES implementation was exposed to automated attack recently, the DevDiv guys got out in front of the issue with a workaround in about four days:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/18/important-...

Then, they continued to stay on top of it, providing guidance until a real patch was available:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/20/frequently...

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/24/update-on-...

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/27/asp-net-se...

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/28/asp-net-se...

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/30/asp-net-se...

CWuestefeld2• 16 years ago

Before making a non-trivial purchase online, I typically do a search for "$vendorname sucks" and/or "$productname sucks", and this has saved me headaches on more than one occasion.

I hope that Google's solution won't interfere with finding bad reviews in this case.

kqr23• 16 years ago

Also, many vendors these days will sell through Amazon.com. It's a lot safer purchasing through Amazon.com since they are very intolerant of bad merchants.

From the original NY Times article:

In other words, Mr. Borker is perfectly capable of minding his manners. And he does so, right now, with every order that comes through a store he runs through Amazon.com’s affiliate program. (He declines to provide that store’s name.) He handles those transactions like a Boy Scout because Amazon doesn’t mess around, he says — the company just kicks you off its site if you infuriate customers.

SandB0x• 16 years ago

How does that work though? Doesn't this method just return negative results by definition? There are a lot of results confirming that "apple sucks" or "toyota sucks".

Genuinely interested, because the only reliable way I've found is to spend hours and hours reading through niche forums and reviews, and for every great product there are plenty of bad comments out there.

joe_the_user3• 16 years ago

You then have to read the review and see the content.

You contrast "one star, it doesn't this obscure thing it didn't to do but otherwise it's great" versus "one star, it fell apart in three days, seriously" and get the idea.

It's a constant battle, altogether.

Hopefully, the Internet will continue to be deeper than the scamsters' ability to game. And hopefully Google will keep helping in this regard.

praptak• 16 years ago

Of course it returns negative results. The key is not to take them blindly.

If they mention specific facts (extra bonus for verifiable ones), do not sound like ones written by poopheads or mass produced by competition, then it's a very strong red flag.

Things like unfavorable terms of service or checked-by-default, hard-to-notice checkboxes subscribing you to worthless additional services are easy to verify, even if you give zero trust to anonymous reviews.

mattmcknight• 16 years ago

And can it recognize a double negative, as in, "all of these Apple sucks sites suck"?

If you can do decent sentiment analysis though, you could lower the page rank granted by a link by sentiment of text in its proximity, while not lowering the rank of the page that contains the negative sentiment.

Caspian• 16 years ago

Me too. They should be able to distinguish between a negative review and the negatively-reviewed website it links to easily enough. Distinguishing the negatively-reviewed website from other links on the reviewing site could be a bit trickier.

_delirium• 16 years ago

While I can understand not giving out details, to avoid gaming, this post as a result doesn't have much content! As far as I can tell, this is the entirety of the description of the change:

we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide a extremely poor user experience

The explanations of what Google didn't do and why are informative, though.

amichail• 16 years ago

Maybe there was no change? They just want to discourage people from doing something similar until they come up with a good solution?

barmstrong2• 16 years ago

Doubtful - "lets release a fake announcement" type ideas I think would get shot down quickly at Google.

tsbaron• 16 years ago

Google's "opinion" for better or worse is fact. Let's hope they figured out a way to differentiate between genuine bad reviews and those with underlying motives.

joe_the_user3• 16 years ago

Even more, once you move to anything slightly controversial, an opinion can be genuine, meaning sincere, but still not valid for the person searching ("they sold me the movie I asked for but it had too much violence!").

barmstrong2• 16 years ago

Total guess, but I believe Google licenses Yelp's data. They may be using the Yelp ranking in place of sentiment analysis to reduce the weight of those links.

andrenotgiant• 16 years ago

they just crawl yelp like any other site, yelp happens to use semantic markup (microformats) on its data.

Google does show special search snippets, and _used_ to show yelp review snippets on place pages, thanks to the microformats markup.

rudd• 16 years ago

Well, they can't really say so clearly exactly what they did. In an effort to stop people from gaming it, they keep their exact algorithm hidden. When people get around it, they tweak it further, in an endless cycle.

My guess is that their solution isn't actually based on customer's true opinions of the vendor, and thus the solution is cheatable. Hiding the solution is probably their best option at this point.

Andrew_Quentin• 16 years ago

The people who are trying to game google, know exactly what the solution from google is, or will find out within weeks. The ones left in the dark are the others, that is, the innocent, or the people who are not trying to cheat google, who equally, can not hold google to account.

Thus, their secrecy serves no purpose but to further their own interests.

ams6110• 16 years ago

Maybe the details will appear on Wikileaks?

rmc• 16 years ago

they keep their exact algorithm hidden

They didn't keep the exact algorithm hidden, they kept the whole algorithm hidden. They didn't even describe it in general.

mycroftiv• 16 years ago

I also do not understand the distinction between the unrevealed "algorithmic solution which detects merchants that provide a poor user experience" and the "sentiment analysis" approach that they say they rejected. I don't get how it is possible to algorithmically detect poor user experience without using sentiment analysis! Isn't negative sentiment more or less the same thing as a poor experience?

robryan• 16 years ago

What I was thinking when I read it, although crawling reviews is another option, both are gameable though. Even a very good algorithm is still going to have the problem of planted reviews, I don't think we are at the stage where an algorithm can decide if a review is genuine.

daten2• 16 years ago

But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.

Google admits, and I agree, that this is a bad idea. But then why are they continuing to attempt it? Wouldn't neutral search results be better than those that favored a subjectively positive or negative business?

yanw• 16 years ago

And how would you go about ranking them then? alphabetically?

More research and trial/error never hurts.

daten2• 16 years ago

Research may not hurt. Trial and error does if the error affects the users.

If something bad is happening in the world, like thousands of people being murdered in some remote country, and every page that links to articles about it has a negative tone because they're condemning what's happening, should google hide those articles?

I would be fine with alphabetical results if they would give me a regular expression search instead of recommended results.

joe_the_user3• 16 years ago

This is an excellent point and deserves more votes.

Google does have somewhat "sneekier" options: - Demote negatively reviewed items only on searches which seem "inherently commercial" - ie, act differently depending on whether the search is for a store or an opinion. - Have some sort of "realness" index: is this entity actually selling sunglasses.

These aren't necessarily easy so your question stands.

nitrogen• 16 years ago

Maybe they are continuing to research it because enough people outside Google think it's a good idea that not researching it would make them appear unresponsive or irresponsible? Kind of like politicians doing something for the sake of being seen doing something.

jeremyjarvis• 16 years ago

I agree. Seems to me to be a knee-jerk reaction by Google - bending to negative mainstream press. I bet this decision came from marketing rather than engineering ;)

aamar• 16 years ago

There might be interesting ways to combine sentiment analysis with other factors.

For example, off the top of my head, combine it with the selectivity of the search word. If the sentiment is positive about a store, then it may be a good search result for a word like "sunglasses" which is associated with many sites. If the sentiment is mostly negative, then it may still rank very highly for keywords/phrases that are highly selective e.g. "decor eyes" while dropping precipitously for the less selective keywords. I.e.: positive sentiment opens up the umbrella, irrespective of how high the umbrella goes.

mcritz• 16 years ago

Google’s headline is “Being bad to your customers is bad for business”.

I always thought “being bad” was analogous to “evil”.

aristidb2• 16 years ago

"Improving algorithms" now involves writing a blacklist? Blacklists are fine, but please don't call them algorithms.

joshuacc• 16 years ago

"we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience."

The implication seems to be that they've found a way of programmatically identifying these offenders.

coliveira• 16 years ago

Of course, this solution probably produces lots of false positives, so they will have to change it later when other complains are raised.

I think the original idea of Google was great, but with each iteration their search results get worse. In the end, it seems that anything they do can be gamed in some way.

aristidb2• 16 years ago

I originally read it the way that they feed the list of merchants manually. But it is possible that I understood that wrong, yeah.

Matt_Cutts• 16 years ago

aristidb, it is an algorithm, not a blacklist. The rankings for hundreds of websites change as a result of this new algorithm.

martincmartin• 16 years ago

When the NY Times article first appeared, the merchant still showed in Google's and Bing's results, but interestingly not in Duck Duck Go's.

ntulip• 16 years ago

the duck missed it

patrickaljord• 16 years ago

"But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials,"

Good one Google.

ry0ohki2• 16 years ago

So can I essentially destroy my competitors search rankings by getting enough people to disparage them on the Internet now?

brianpan2• 16 years ago

Fortunately, libel/defamation is against the law.

ry0ohki2• 16 years ago

Seriously good luck suing an anonymous person on Get Satisfaction for libel

inerte• 16 years ago

You mean by getting a (single) programmer.

ankimal• 16 years ago

Rule number one in online retail is looking up the vendor before you buy anything, no matter how much money you are saving. I dont see why any one should blame Google for this. Next thing you know, people are gonna want directions on google maps which others recommend as opposed to other metrics. If I got car jacked on a certain route, blame Google, it gave me directions.

TotlolRon• 16 years ago

"A wise old owl sat in a Valley,

The more he saw, the less he believed,

The less he believed, the more he saw,

We never ask: what is the last straw?"

-- @taylorbuley in TC comments regarding something else, 2010

mixmax• 16 years ago

derefr actually proposed using sentiment analysis in the discussion on the original NY Times article. Not a bad call.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949064

kenjackson• 16 years ago

Why not just put sentiment analysis directly in the search results?

Search for: Designer Discount Glasses and maybe this page still is on the first page, but have a frowny face by the link, to indicate that sentiment analysis is largely negative.

Don't hide anything, but make how the site is relevant more apparent.

thefool• 16 years ago

They seemed to say that such an option was still on the table.

JangoSteve• 16 years ago

How cool would it be if the guy behind this site did a writeup now to show what happens to search traffic and income when you shit on customers, then get your very own article in the NYTimes, and then Google tweaks their search algorithm specifically to hurt you?

jeffreyrusso• 16 years ago

This was an artful response. Google took what was essentially a piece of negative press from the New York Times and used it as an argument against the call for transparency in the algorithm that so many major media sources are pushing for lately.

dcdan• 16 years ago

This feels like mostly a PR piece to me. And reports seem conflicting.

Google doesn't seem to say what they did beyond that they "developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience."

Danny Sullivan claims they are "Using Online Merchant Reviews As Ranking Signal" (http://searchengineland.com/google-now-using-online-merchant...).

Techcrunch claims Google "compiled a list of hundreds of merchants (including DecorMyEyes) that provided “bad user experience” and algorithmically forced them lower" (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/googl/).

edit: typo

lawrence• 16 years ago

Hopefully this is PR spin. If it's not, it's pretty disturbing that allegations of one mean merchant can cause an algo change. How many businesses will be collateral damage of this update? How many fake negative review campaigns with this spawn? If this is a real algo change, it was done in an extraordinarily hasty, reactionary, and cavalier manner. (Please don't ding my site G, nothing personal)

smiler• 16 years ago

The techcrunch piece is nothing more than some filler around the Google blog post. I don't think it's offering any extra insight.

adammichaelc• 16 years ago

Seems to have worked (not like I was expecting it not to). This search term used to show DecorMyEyes on the 1st page, but no longer does:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

chintan• 16 years ago

And they are still on the Index

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

Google_franke• 16 years ago

Now mute google conversations the smarter way. The unmute feature added to More Actions on Emails. http://bit.ly/gX0roM

econner2• 16 years ago

I couldn't help but fix on these two sentences:

"We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google’s ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That’s why we cannot reveal the details of our solution—the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings—beyond what we’ve already said."

Doesn't this sound like the exact things security people used to say before realizing that they needed to make their mechanisms public in order to ensure their security.

extension• 16 years ago

Transparency works when the problem is solvable and the only obstacle is human error. It doesn't work for rock, paper, scissors.

econner2• 16 years ago

Hmm, good point. That makes sense.

skm• 16 years ago

Would anyone else like sentiment controls in google's search tools sidebar? Three settings I'd use would be: • Show more results about which people talk positively • Show more results about which people talk negatively • Show results which generate strong opinions, both positive and negative

Alternatively, a "show sentiment for this search" which added a small indicator next to the search results might do the trick. (Just to be clear, I'm not proposing adjusting the ranking of pages based on the sentiment on the page itself, interesting though that might be, but rather based on the sentiment in the text surrounding links to that page.)

From Google's blog: As it turns out, Google has a world-class sentiment analysis system (Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs). But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.

pzxc• 16 years ago

Now if they could only get rid of BigResource.com pages. They come a lot on my searches, especially coding specific ones, and that site has no content of its own. It just aggregates forum threads from other forums (not its own), and what's worse it's usually in such a broken way as to not let you read the thread on the page you're given OR find the original forum thread it was scraped from.

Yeah, I know, there are a lot of questionable sites cropping up more and more as everyone is going all DemandMedia on monetizing SERPs without providing much real value. That's kind of my point, and why I don't bother reporting BigResource even if I thought it would accomplish something (which it wouldn't) -- because it is by far not alone.

Google used to be so good at identifying scraped sites or made-for-adsense and it seems more and more are not only slipping through the cracks but in fact dominating the search results. To me this is a much more important issue than that of people getting a ton of backlinks from negative stories/comments which anyone with half a brain would be wary of giving money to if they actually checked (by searching for the company itself directly and discovering all the bad press instead of just searching for "$mycity $productname" and then giving their credit card info). Yes, I know that's too much to expect of most people. But really, I think google should try to help people who can effectively use their engine and try hard to do so but get poor-quality results before people who can't or won't bother to use it effectively.

subbu• 16 years ago

And thanks to Google Earth, he can faux-stalk his customers without leaving his house

Add google streetview and their latest Google Earth 6 (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/introducing-google-ea...), it makes it even more easier to stalk people without leaving your chair.

shasta• 16 years ago

I wonder if they're going to apply this filtering technology to their sponsored links. There are paying scammers, too.

tomger• 16 years ago

I don't understand why people think the internet works any different than real life.

You don't just buy products in a dodgy shop, even if it's the first shop you see.

Google is as responsible for this as a phonebook company would be for giving you a bad phone number.

NikkiA• 16 years ago

> Google is as responsible for this as a phonebook company would be for giving you a bad phone number.

Generally, I agree, except that there is an important distinction to be made - the phonebook generally doesn't rank businesses into any order other than alphabetical. Yes, the phonebook has 'paid listings' in addition, which are bigger and more prominent, but google has these too, and like the phonebook these are labelled as such.

But the general google listings are sorted into a form of meaningful order, people expect (rightly or wrongly) that the higher up in the general listings a result is, the better it is likely to be because more people use it.

I'm not sure what the best solution to the issue is, perhaps just to accept that google isn't the best resource for finding reputable businesses, and try and educate people on the alternatives.

jalpino• 16 years ago

I wonder if Google took into consideration their own customer service into the equation? Non-existent support is just as bad as being a douche.

Google responds to NY Times article by improving its algorithms

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