Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/technology/google-casts-a-big-shadow-on-smaller-web-sites.html?pagewanted=all

by iProject • 14 years ago

75 74 14 years ago

TomGullen2• 14 years ago

What's the complaint here? Google makes changes that sometimes negatively impact someone's business?

As long as Google's algorithm is trending in the correct direction (that is towards better quality results) then these complaints are just growing pains and I don't see much of a problem.

Some startups are criticised for simply being features of a chosen platform. Once they get big enough, the platform in control will simply add the feature and eliminate the startup. I'm unfamiliar with Nextag but it looks like a price comparison site and you could perhaps argue that price comparison is simply a missing feature of Google.

AnthonyMouse• 14 years ago

>What's the complaint here? Google makes changes that sometimes negatively impact someone's business?

As far as I can tell, it's largely a bunch of spammers trying to attack Google for downranking their spam.

The argument is that Google competes with them and so shouldn't be allowed to use its dominance to favor its own service. But it's pure nonsense. These companies aren't valid search results. They only ever got into the results through SEO, and then they wail when the algorithm improves to kick them out. Someone who searches for "kitchen table" is looking for a website selling or providing information about kitchen tables, not a search engine that allows them to search for websites selling or providing information about kitchen tables. The user is already on a search engine -- other search engines are not relevant search results unless the search term is in the nature of "XYZ search engine."

What the complainers are doing is the equivalent of going into the largest chain of retail stores and putting boxes on the shelves labeled with a brand that the major retailer doesn't carry, which don't actually contain any product but instead contain a map to other stores that carry the brand the retailer doesn't. And then complaining when the retailer doesn't allow the spam products to remain on their shelves, and claiming it's an antitrust violation because the retailer has the most market share and it sells its own competing brands of products.

Naturally that doesn't convince judges or sell newspapers, so the spammers scour the world for instances of algorithmic imperfection that give a bad ranking to someone else, who unlike the spammers didn't actually deserve it, and then play ominous music as they reveal the shocking fact that some Google engineer's 20% project or some little-known subsidiary responsible for 0.00043% of corporate revenue arguably competes with the disadvantaged website in some fashion.

Evbn8• 14 years ago

As HN favorite duckduckgo shows, sometimes the best result a search engine can provide is in fact another search engine. But not always, and not forever.

stfu2• 14 years ago

“We try very hard to make sure we communicate with Webmasters,” Mr. Cutts says. For instance, he says, he reassured Gawker Media that it would remain in search results after Hurricane Sandy caused it to crash.

This somewhat perfectly summarizes the genius solution Google found to customer service. Google is very keen to react with a personal face to high profile cases while at the same time squeezing all the thousands of faceless small businesses in similar situations into Adwords.

TomGullen2• 14 years ago

How is Google squeezing small businesses?

sudont• 14 years ago

Basically, the volatility of their algorithm and the opaqueness of it means that any small business that is getting >80% Google-referred traffic is in for a tough time if they're marked as bad. And mistakes happen. Say:

* A canonical tag that shows up due to a bug. Dead.

* Industry terms that appear duplicative to the NLP parser. Dead.

* Too-diverse content. Lower rankings, but functionally dead.

There's tons more, but I'm not a practitioner of SEO.

stfu2• 14 years ago

Just because most reactions somewhat imply shady SEO problems:

Cutts' clearly states, that they are giving preferred treatment to a high viability site such as Gawker, while normal websites (i.e. internet peasants) would have been de-indexed in the same situation. Cutts' fulltime job is communicating ranking related issues, so I am quite certain this would have sounded a lot different if this would have been implemented as a general rule for disaster ridden IP ranges etc.

ksikka• 14 years ago

Some sites go down in rankings, but other (hopefully) more useful sites go up in rankings.

Also if your company is impacted negatively by this, you should attempt to focus more on social network effects to reduce reliance on Google. For example, integration from Facebook and Twitter opens up more channels for users to visit your site through.

victorantos• 14 years ago

my 5 year old website has dropped traffic 3X suddenly, I was shocked, who to blame now, Google? https://dl.dropbox.com/u/45940875/google-negatively-affects-...

camus• 14 years ago

The question is, is google the web? why do we rely so much on google ? because we became lazy ... because browsers like firefox promoted google search heavily , until it becomes obsolete as a browser itself because of chrome , because all these comparison sites built their businesses on google search engine, and now google has his own shopping search engine , they became obsolete , and the list goes on and on... our businesses rely too much on google, until google take us out of business...

snogglethorpe2• 14 years ago

> why do we rely so much on google ? because we became lazy

Because google delivers amazingly good results.

[Oh, and FF certainly isn't "obsolete because of chrome." Both are fine browsers, and the competition has proved beneficial to both of them.]

enneff• 14 years ago

Furthermore, judging by this graph

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Usage_share_o...

it seems that Chrome's rise in popularity correlates with IE's decline.

staunch2• 14 years ago

The problem is that Google competes with businesses that once thrived on its platform. It's similar to when Microsoft decided to bundle IE into Windows. Google now bundles comparison shopping and local business reviews into search.

If they go too far in this direction it will probably hurt them. Users don't want a search engine that puts its own, lesser quality, sites at the top.

It'd be amazing if Google spun off Google Search as its own company. The business is so narrow and successful that it could probably survive for 50 years without any fundamental change. Instead, it's being distorted and weighed down by a sprawling organization that's desperate to create new businesses, and compromising the search product to do so.

itp3• 14 years ago

Maybe you can help me understand this analogy a little better. You say that it's similar to when Microsoft decided to bundle IE into Windows, but the comparison isn't totally obvious to me at first blush.

Microsoft went to great (and often illegal?) lengths to prevent customers from considering or being able to make use of alternatives. Consumers had a great deal of lock in -- a user of a Windows computer often had software that would only be compatible with a new computer that also ran Windows, for instance. And Microsoft was able to use that leverage to acquire and keep users of its browser software.

Google doesn't seem to be following that pattern, as far as I can see. Users can (and do) make use of Google services from non-Google platforms. Google makes its products available to people using browsers other than Chrome, phones other than Android, etc. Performing a Google search requires no account.

I use Google for a lot of services, and I certainly don't want a lesser quality site at the top of my search results. I haven't seen that, either. I _have_ seen Google augment its already stellar services with new features that enhance my experience, and I ignore those things that haven't. If I ever find myself unable to ignore or disable things, I'll probably switch to another search engine. Which I'm free to do, since my use of the internet isn't controlled by Google!

You make some assertions that I'm just not seeing the evidence for, but I'd like to hear more about them. It seems uncontroversial that users don't want lesser quality search results. Where is the evidence that they are seeing them? And if they are, why aren't they switching to a different search engine? Why should Google have to separate their "core" search business from their other ventures right at a time when the expanded product (things like Google Now) is proving just how revolutionary a next-generation, personalized, multi-source search agent can be?

staunch2• 14 years ago

The thing that's similar to what Microsoft did with IE is that Google is leveraging its monopoly position to compete in new businesses.

Search "headphones" on Google and you'll see the massive ad spot taken up by Google Shopping. They've done similar things with the way they integrate Google Local/Zagat into local business searches.

That's the equivalent of the kind of deep integration Microsoft did with IE. IE wasn't just another application in Windows, it was built-in and inseparable. The same is true of Google's products, they're automatically highlighted, and at the top of, every relevant query.

It seems pretty obviously anti-competitive to me. I think their only defense is that they claim not to be a monopoly, but no one who's on the receiving end of Google traffic can agree with that claim.

I actually think they should spin off Google Search for their own sake. To maintain the integrity and long-term quality of the product.

kyrra• 14 years ago

Search makes google zero dollars. Adwords makes google lots and lots of money. Adwords is about getting their paying customers ads infront of users. Search, product review, gmail, and lots or other apps are ways for google to make money.

Adwords is Googles firehose of money. Their other products help push that or are trying to find new ways to make money.

doctorpangloss2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure that Google had such a cogent strategy when it made its blockbuster products and acquisitions, like Gmail, Docs, Picasa, and YouTube. It wasn't obvious that YouTube ads could make enough money to pay for the servers, and indeed it took a while to be profitable. Maybe the strategy was just that Google should do better and cheaper than others.

I think individual engineers looked at things (e.g.) Microsoft made, like Outlook, made it better, and made it free. Nobody should be surprised if the corporate go-ahead was made on the basis of undercutting Microsoft rather than driving ad revenue (at the time).

ridiculous_fish2• 14 years ago

I think the most serious concern is how Google promotes its own offerings above more popular competitors in the search results section. For example, do a search for "finance" and Google Finance is shown above Yahoo! finance, even though Yahoo! finance is better by most measures, and far more popular (see http://www.businessinsider.com/google-finance-yahoo-finance-... )

If you rely on Google to drive traffic, but also compete with Google, that puts you in a difficult spot.

Consumers ought to be annoyed too. Google has historically does a good job distinguishing between links that are artificially promoted (ads) and algorithmic rankings. But Google is artificially promoting their own offerings and presenting them as if they're a result of the algorithm.

This seems like a bad strategy. It has the potential to shake user confidence in Google's impartiality and link quality, annoy site maintainers, and drive away advertisers.

timothya2• 14 years ago

I'm not convinced that Google moves it's own results up as part of the organic search results. Bing puts Google Finance first before Yahoo Finance as well. Regardless of it's popularity, its position may simply because of other signals in the ranking algorithm.

ridiculous_fish2• 14 years ago

Google freely admits to putting their own links first. Here's what Marissa Mayer said in 2007:

We didn't actually have Google Finance until about a year ago. Up until then we were ordering the links based on various published metrics... We had the five top finance sites in their order of their popularity listed there. So we rolled out Google Finance, we put the Google link first.

(You can watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT1UFZSbcxE - that quote starts at 44:50.)

Your observation regarding Bing is quite interesting. Your theory may very well be right, but there's a hilarious alternative:

It's known that Microsoft uses Google's rankings (see http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-... ). This would then propagate onto Yahoo, which uses Bing's engine, which means that Yahoo is told their own site is less popular. But Yahoo puts their site first, which may mean they're artificially boosting its ranking, under the guidance of you know who!

So 2012 Marissa Mayer may be artificially boosting Yahoo's rank to defeat 2007's Marissa Mayer's artificial boost of Google's rank. Ha!

xpose2000• 14 years ago

It's tough to find any wrong doing by Google in an article like this. It's pure speculation. Many of their tools, step on other sites toes. Hipmunk and kayak recently had to deal with https://www.google.com/flights/.

When searching for goods such as "macbook pro" you'll notice sponsored links with prices that Google "may be compensated from". That type of stuff seems unfair to me.

I won't say Google is playing unfair as of late, but they are certainly more than just displaying results these days.

mladenkovacevic• 14 years ago

Hmm I wonder if Nextag's traffic is being affected not by Google's algorithm changing to hurt them personally, but rather to include more localized results.

Example: Whenever I want to do comparison shopping I would type in "{{product name}} price canada". A few years ago Nextag would always come up first and I would click on it, only to be frustrated by the fact that the retailers listed were all American. Now not too long ago more and more of these services cropped up that offered Canadian listings (shopbot.ca, canoe.ca, and now even Canada Post has their own website that does the same thing). Now imagine this happening country by country all over the world and it's not inconceivable that Nextag's traffic would be shrinking. Also I've just realized that Nextag also has a .ca destination but for some reason I've NEVER seen it come up in my results.

capo• 14 years ago

The folks at Nextag (which by the way sells product listings without disclosing them and then complains about google: http://searchengineland.com/given-nextags-lack-of-transparen...) are telling the same sob story to every reporter who would listen. Their complaint is that they keep getting less free traffic from Google as if they are somehow entitled to it, they insist that they are living in a "Google world" and then go on to contradict that by saying that they are diversifying.

It’s frustrating that the reporters are trying to cast doubt over every instance of a website getting demoted in rank as if the web is static and Google’s code base is unchanging, and they don't even give much consideration to inevitable errors in large and complicated systems. They offer no proof just speculations and innuendo.

But what I find to be most frustrating is that this article shares the same blind insistence with Google’s opponents that search engines must only rank blue links, and only links to other websites, which is not only an ati-innovation stance but also an unintuitive one. As IBM’s Watson and to a lesser extent Siri has shown, search interface is about immediate answers, and the ultimate answer to these accusations still stands: if you don't like Google’s results use another service, if you can't reach a certain website via Google you can go directly to their website or get their smartphone app or follow them on Twitter or Facebook or bloody Instagram.

It is also worth mentioning that the NYT ran editorials urging the government to investigate Google, and I think a disclaimer mentioning that ought to have preceded the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15thu3.html

schwabacher• 14 years ago

I am with you on all points until your last - Newspapers take great pains to keep news and editorial departments separate.

I don't think it is common practice to disclose past editorials on the same topic as news articles, and if it were, the New York Times would have to disclose stances on both sides of many issues.

doctorpangloss2• 14 years ago

If you don't like Google’s results use another service.

Sure, but Google has two kinds of customers: searchers and websites.

Maybe you believe websites shouldn't hide from Google because it makes no strategic sense. Twitter and Facebook don't let Google index their content. Why would they let Google front-run ads on their content? It's not a catchall rule, to hide with robots.txt.

Maybe websites should just pay up: they should auction for higher results, if their business depends on search placement. But that's misunderstanding Google's role.

Google isn't a salesperson. It's more like a road. Both bring business to your door (literally), but the latter gets used by everyone for everything. And it turns out it doesn't matter how you pave the road (roads have been public since the Egyptian times, yet road-building technology has changed dramatically) or whatever.

To Nextag, Google is a utility. It is only by tradition that some monopolists become utilities and others do not. How do you regulate Google for what it is: a public utility?

DrJ• 14 years ago

I think before we turn google into the utility, we should turn the infrastructure that google runs on into a public utility.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

Maybe websites should just pay up: they should auction for higher results, if their business depends on search placement.

Isn't that exactly what AdWords is?

As a consumer, I definitely what to know what is being paid for to show up and what isn't.

dchuk2• 14 years ago

No, google has one customer: advertisers. Searchers don't directly make Google any money, advertisers do. Google is not a public utility, it's the most successful online advertising machine ever.

makomk2• 14 years ago

If searchers can't find what they're looking for on Google, they'll go elsewhere though. Before Google downranked sites like Nextag I seriously considered moving to a different search engine altogether because they were rendering it pretty much useless for any topic they'd got their claws into. I'd search for reviews or technical information on a netbook or some other consumer electronics and get page after page of nothing but useless "comparison shopping" and "vertical search" sites, none of which actually had any meaningful information on and all of which appeared to be automatically generated.

It's no wonder that Google cracked down; they were destroying its main service - search - in order to make a cheap buck for themselves by driving out useful results and driving searchers to turn to them in desperation.

joelrunyon6• 14 years ago

This seems similar to Hollywood complaining that dvd sales are down because people want to stream stuff over the internet.

Technology changes. The rules change. Don't complain that you built a company based on outdated business strategies (renting dvds or monetizing search traffic). Change your strategy and take advantage of the new opportunities.

programminggeek• 14 years ago

The problem: "Nextag’s response? It doubled its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months."

Google knows this and they have an incentive to move "commercial" sites towards AdWords and move "informational" sites higher in the organic results. The benefit is engineers can claim they are providing a better end user search experience while AdWords can make even more money.

The bigger problem is that the top 10 on a search string can be very arbitrary. What should be the top ten for the search term "shoes"? Wikipedia? Zappos? Local shoe stores? A blog about shoes? Are the top 10 the top 10 because they should be there or simply because Google put them there?

Nextag is an example of a company built on a platform (Google organic search results) that is somewhat hostile to Nextag's business. It's similar to the whole Twitter client app situation. Nextag needs Google, but Google doesn't need Nextag. It's an unequal partnership of sorts and Google doesn't care of Nextag exists.

It's too bad, but that is the nature of Google's platform.

joelrunyon6• 14 years ago

I'm really amazed (and impressed) at how many mentions & links Vote-USA got throughout that article. Seemed like an inordinate amount for the number of times it was mentioned.

Also, I get the whole "we got deindexed" from Google, but duplicate content is not necessarily a new thing. If you got penalized for it, so did a bunch of other people. You shouldn't act like it's a surprise and whine about it. Just fix it and move on.

Evbn8• 14 years ago

(Obligatory http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html link)

joelrunyon6• 14 years ago

The entire premise of this article seems bogus to me.

"Google casts a big shadow on smaller web sites."

That title implies that Google is specifically targeting smaller web sites which isn't the case.

The problem seems to be that some shady small business did some shady stuff, got caught and got mad about it.

Google didn't go and replace them with walmart, they probably replaced them in the results with a similar sized company. Someone lost and someone won – that's it.

I'm the first to say Google should step up it's customer service, but it's disingenuous to act like Google is proactively seeking out small businesses who never did anything wrong in favor of big massive conglomerations.

lazyjones• 14 years ago

I can sympathize with Nextag on the topic of Google entering their market and possibly being a little less than objective regarding their own product (Benjamin Edelman has written about this several times: http://www.benedelman.org/).

On the other hand, getting 60% traffic from Google is very unhealthy (18 mil. of 30 mil. monthly users?) and doesn't make Nextag look like a site people stick to because of its quality. None of the sites I visit daily (directly) has anywhere near that much search traffic (according to Alexa), so perhaps Nextag hits are perceived by searchers as "generic", interchangeable results that happen to rank well on Google and they don't care much whether the hits are from Nextag, Google Shopping or any other e-commerce site.

jameswyse• 14 years ago

If these kind of sites stop clogging up my search results then I'm all for it, good job Google!

EGreg3• 14 years ago

It seems like NexTag, and maybe other sites, are complaining that they are getting less free traffic from google. Why do they think they are entitled to have as much free traffic as ever?

Towards the end, they say they are on their way to stop living in "Google's world" and the revised plan gives them "a shot at being a very healthy company," less dependent on Google. Well, great! So if they are able to do that, why involve regulators? They should have done that before!

alpatters• 14 years ago

I do wonder sometimes if google's own site would pass its site quality guidelines. Like duplicated content; the same content appearing on multiple pages, all pages should be linked from somewhere on the site or a site map, substantial original content.

I think it fails on all three of these, so in some sense it is anti-competitive to block other sites that fail these measures whilst it doesn't hold itself up to those same standards.

Evbn8• 14 years ago

Example of a bad google page that ranks high in search?

Xion• 14 years ago

> The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s.

I can't help to notice that apparently in the last 15 years or so, a significant government interest was only focused on high-tech companies. Looks like more "traditional" branches of economy and companies working therein are generally behaving fine...

Companies like Lehman Brothers, for example.

bocalogic• 14 years ago

Well, if you are not satisfied with google you can always use bing and yahoo. I do suggest you search for the same thing on each service to see the differences in your rankings.

One thing I did not see mentioned was the new google rollout on adwords and merchant center (google base feed). Google use to allow free submissions of products into the shopping segment, but now all of your product submissions must be linked to an adwords account by which google adwords can charge you. It steps directly on nextags formula.

jl00080• 14 years ago

Dont want to see Google monopolize the search engine market in future, and it is the reason why sometimes i will use bing.com. Actually it is not bad.

gscott• 14 years ago

Google Search is becoming more like adwords. They just removed a site I manage because it doesn't meet the Google quality guidelines easyfastcheaponlinetrafficeschool.com. When they remove your site its like disappearing from the internet... I had to switch the site to a new domain and the loss in sales has been about $70,000+ so far not to mention spending more on adwords.

Evbn8• 14 years ago

Pretty sure Google's long published webmaster guide discouraged that domain name years ago.

alexkearns• 14 years ago

Our web app has recently been hit by a Google algorithm change. Search traffic has fallen off a cliff. If it continues, it could be a threat to our business.

We have never done any underhand SEO. We haven't done any SEO at all. People love the app but now, alas, they can't find it.

Ironically, just before we fell out of the search rankings, a Google developer evangelist got in touch to say how much they liked our app and that Google would like to partner with our app on an upcoming initiative.

If there are any Google engineers here who would like to help, I'd be most appreciative.

Evbn8• 14 years ago

Do some white hat SEO.

Google.com/webmaster

wrath• 14 years ago

I work for a company that relied primarily on Google for it's source of revenue. About a year ago our traffic dramatically dropped because of a change in Google's algorithm. We always had plans to diversify our business but we never did. At the time it hit us hard, but we were able refocused our business. As a consequence our business is far healthier than it was in the past. Google is only a fraction of our traffic generation strategy, essentially we have a sustainable business model now.

greggoodson• 14 years ago

Wow - when will this guy stop? This isn't new. Every few months, Jeff Katz goes on a Google rant. And it's getting old.

From 2011. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190337400457658... http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/nextag-ceo-google-is-a-mono...

Having worked in-house for several large online retailers as well as a handful of independent clients on the side, the comparison shopping engine industry was my obsession for several years. CSEs can make you money, but it doesn't take long to figure out all CSEs do is play a game of "sell traffic to retailers for cheaper than they can buy it themselves." After 12 months of CSEs, it was obvious that being a "CSE expert" wasn't a good career path for me.

Arguably, Nextag's four competitors are Google Shopping, Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, and Shopping.com. Google Shopping was free to list your products for the longest time (until earlier this year), which provided for a much better user experience. Between 2008 and 2010, Google Shopping's marketshare kept eating away at these other CSEs. It was clear their product was better on all fronts.

I think it should also be noted that in 2005, Shopzilla was acquired by Scripps for $525M. Scripps sold Shopzilla to a private equity company for $165M last year. Pricegrabber was bought in 2005 as well - $485M price tag. They just got dumped for ~$80M.

Most CSEs were founded in the 90s; you could argue that their models haven't changed since. It's not working anymore. Take it with a grain of salt, but peek at Google trends and Nextag's Alexa site info:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/nextag.com http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nextag

Nextag's services are becoming obsolete. I find it concerning that their response is to "double its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months". I guarantee you they're seeing the same kind of traffic patterns in Bing as well.

Nextag is just a whole bunch of click arbitrage silliness. Don't drink the kool-aid.

Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

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