Google is Doping the Horses

http://exploreto.tumblr.com/post/11266458800/google-is-doping-the-horses

by cupcake_death • 15 years ago

19 26 15 years ago

exploreto.tumblr.com

“You run the racetrack, own the racetrack, you didn’t have horses for a while but now you do and your horses seem to be winning.”

patio11• 15 years ago

Google 2011 is not Google 2001 in many ways, some good and some bad. One way which people haven't cottoned to yet is that Google 2011 privately realizes that it controls navigation on the Internet and bakes this advantage into the distribution strategy for every project they care about.

Did people not notice this when Chrome got front page billing? When Google Video got thumbnails on the SERPS, expanded to YouTube once it joined the family? When Google Maps/local got 50% of the screen real estate for local queries? etc, etc

This frog is not being boiled. The bones dissolved, the water evaporated, and the fire went out years ago.

aaronwall• 15 years ago

Absolutely right on the money, as usual.

According to Compete.com, the % of downstream traffic from Google.com to YouTube has roughly tripled since the first Panda algorithm roll out 7 months ago.

wylie• 15 years ago

Big surprise. It's not even the first time they've done this (remember Google profiles?)

cloudwalking• 15 years ago

The google.com domain has a better PageRank (10) than LinkedIn (9). Not saying this totally justifies the ranking, but it certainly has some effect. Especially if PageRank is a magnitude scale.

cupcake_death9• 15 years ago

plus.google.com is a subdomain and would inherit some value as linked from Google.com - That doesn't justify the ranking of an internal page that's not connected from the plus.google.com home page.

dannyr6• 15 years ago

I looked at the Linked profile vs Google+. LinkedIn has stale content while the Google+ is often and recently updated.

To me that makes more sense.

Searching for my own name. Twitter & my own blog appear first because they are updated more often than my Google+ profile.

dannyr6• 15 years ago

Have you guys tried searching for "Guy Kawasaki"?

On my results, GK's LinkedIn profile is ahead of his Google+.

Google might be personalizing the search results.

cupcake_death9• 15 years ago

Try this URL http://www.google.com/search?q=Guy+Kawasaki&pws=0&ad... - It's as close as I think you can achieve to non-personalized search, (From ip, pws=0 parameter, Google ad test).

citricsquid2• 15 years ago

I have a google plus account, but I never use it, I've only visited his website once, as you can see by the purple links: http://i.imgur.com/xeULP.png

If I scroll futher down you can see 2 more instances of google plus -- http://i.imgur.com/1fHm5.png, although I assume this is because I follow both Tom Anderson and Vic Gundotra. However for me personally I couldn't give a shit about g+ and it seems clear to me at least that they are (as the blog author suggests) boosting the position of g+ just because it's a google product.

dannyr6• 15 years ago

With yours, LinkedIn is below visualcv.

Not in my case.

I guess since people you follow on Google+ have shared something related to Guy Kawasaki, that's why Google deemed it more relevant. It doesn't factor in if you use Google+ or not.

They are not only doing that with Google+ but with Twitter too.

buro9• 15 years ago

We all know that Google Search doesn't have an algorithm as such, it has hundreds of signals that weight results for the positive or negative.

All we're seeing here is that Google have determined that Plus is a good signal since they assume that their knowledge of that data can be trusted and verified more than the data held by a third party.

They are probably right on that, so you can imagine that they would class it as a very strong signal, such that against another resource with many weaker signals the other resource loses and the Plus page ranks higher.

The only question is whether this is in some way a bad thing.

Is it bad to place a strong signal on one of your own properties?

To not place a signal would be equivalent to negatively placing a signal as they most likely do have signals against other identity services (LinkedIn and Facebook), but to place an equal signal is to say that you only trust your own data as much as a third party - which is probably not the case, you trust your own more.

To place a strong signal is probably correct in terms of your trust of the data, but does raise the spectre of being questioned about whether this is fair behaviour.

cupcake_death9• 15 years ago

Eric Schmidt: “Senator, may I simply say that I can assure you we’ve not cooked anything".

magicalist• 15 years ago

exactly. I don't see this as that different than the unit converter or whatever that best guess thing was recently (or including a map on a location-like query, or a row of image thumbnails for popular celebrity names)...google thinks you're looking for a person, and they have a person lookup service. moreover, that service contains information populated by the people that you can look up, which makes it more likely to be exactly what you are looking for.

as buro9 said, the interesting questions have nothing to do with the (stupid) doped horse analogy or whether this upsets some platonic ideal of a page-ranked search index (in reality, they don't exist and no one would want to use one).

the interesting questions are if google including this information is harming competitors that would bring innovation to the market, whether that's even a bad thing, long term, and if (somehow) preventing google from including this would just hobble a mostly good product or would actually materially improve things for consumers.

those are really hard questions, and asking them like this just diminishes the level of debate that can be had about them.

cupcake_death9• 15 years ago

We, (http://www.explore.to) recently were penalized by Google for having thin content. That is, we have business profiles that are yet to be claimed and enriched by business owners, (As do lots of Google Places listings, (That appear above the fold)). Yet, thin content via Google's own properties is fine? http://www.google.com/search?q=Mark+Zuckerberg&pws=0&...

Zuckerbergs profile is adding nothing to the Google users experience, except for visibility of G+.

jrockway• 15 years ago

I don't see the problem here. If you are searching for "Guy Kawasaki", it would make sense that his social networking profile would be among the results. Yes, he uses Google for his social networking, but he seems to be pretty popular there, and so it doesn't seem very farfetched for Google to return his profile as a result.

Also, let's assume that Google is putting its own content before other people's content. The Internet is open, so there's nothing wrong with this. Your search engine can index Google (and the rest of the Internet), so just use that one instead. Just because making a search engine is hard doesn't mean that Google should be forced to not show its own content. If anything, that's a reason why they should.

socratic2• 15 years ago

I realize that in the SEO world, the standards of evidence are necessarily a little less rigorous. But, what?

I mean, I'm totally inclined to believe that Google is somehow promoting G+, but this does not strike me as convincing evidence. Neither does "I've seen lots of other examples!" Is there some credible information to be had, here?

Frankly, the output for this query suggests to me that Google isn't doing a very good job on this query in the first place. The photos of Guy aren't until the second page of results, and for some reason AllTop (possibly for SERP diversity reasons) is above many of his social media profiles.

Lastly, the G+ link is the seventh link. Only 50% of searchers even look at what the seventh link is! Is the claim that they are just trying to juice the results subtly?

cupcake_death9• 15 years ago

Opening this up to rigor by peer sharing. Where are the signals that all other sites are subject to? Where is the crawlable structure, or the inbound links?

socratic2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if this article has gotten flagged out of existence, given that I don't see it on the front page anymore.

But it seems a little fishy that the OP got a -50 penalty from Google due to SEO, and now the OP is trying to get a blog post featuring one anecdotal data point about Google's results being unfair to the top of HN, no? I mean, the appearances seem a bit weird.

cupcake_death9• 15 years ago

Just pointing out what seems to be a hypocrisy

dannyr6• 15 years ago

By having only one instance to prove your point?

Show us more proof.

Google is Doping the Horses

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