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onmyradar

As they say, "Google is at War." Google has released some info. on upcoming changes to their search engine queries. This may affect the ranking of your site in relation to other sites in a search query. This could go both ways, but since we are all amazing sites, we shouldn't have to worry too much.

Anyways, thought this might interest some of you ...

http://mashable.com/2011/02/25/google-content-farms/

x4a

Yeah, well Google is saying that they are improving the quality of their search by weeding out "content farms" and that's true I guess.

But there may be more to this than meets the eye. NY Times outed J.C. Penney for using "Black Hat" optimization techniques but it just may go deeper and in another direction than just that. And apparently Google has spanked Penney's in the past, so why did this happen again at a huge magnitude during the 2010 holiday season?

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search - NY Times article

And yeah it looked like Penney's was fucking working the system good. But, at the end of the NY Times piece, there was an interesting tidbit.......

Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: “Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google’s natural search.” And: “Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google’s natural search?”

Yeah, it may be for the conspiracy-minded Google haters. But, I can't help to wonder? It's always about the fucking money, especially when you are talking about huge corporations like Google....

Tim

I'm not saying Google did or didn't fiddle their results for JC Penney (and I honestly imagine they didn't), but what is interesting is that they are now fair game in the general "corporations are evil" slant. I'm not sure that was the case a year ago, but the public at large do now see Google as a big corporation with the greed that implies rather than the "do no evil" company profile they managed to keep for so long.

Sean R

I think that's a natural evolution of Google diversifying into other sectors like smartphones. If they'd just stayed a search engine, I imagine the scrutiny wouldn't be as intensive.

x4a

Well, I'm sure that doesn't help but they have been fending off the antitrust stuff for a few years now, mainly centered on their search engine.

Sure there's a bunch throwing around the Big Corp greed and evil stuff. Easy to fall into that trap when you are just a lower middle class guy using the internet. But the fact is the history of big Corp's and antitrust has gone on for years and years. IBM went through a 13 year antitrust case in the 70s, Microsoft was under scrutiny in the early 90s and then went to trial in '98 which carried on for close to five years. And they're still under scrutiny. Intel vs AMD which resulted in Intel forking over $1.25 billion to AMD in 2009. Apple etc. etc. Shit, antitrust lawsuits in the US go all the way back to 1890 when the Sherman Act was enacted.

Back in '08 (pre smartphone/android) Google generated $22 billion in revenues and $4.2 billion in net profits. Today, there are approximately 3 billion Google searches per day. Google is a free search engine but remember that advertisers pay Google to have their ads pop up when billions of keywords are entered everyday. That's smart business but unfortunately it opens the door to legal "attacks". Comes with the territory, part of being the the top advertising dog on the Internet.

Personally, I love all the free Google products that I use everyday: GMail, Picasa, Google Earth, Buzz, Calendar, Docs, Feedburner, YouTube - on and on. And of course using the internet would be useless without Google search.

However, as they have gotten so big, sometimes checks and balances fall through the cracks. Management becomes fragmented and their employee base is gigantic. So, one little poorly executed business decision could easily get magnified beyond control. All I really care about is when I search for something, I'm going to get fairly accurate results that aren't skewed. But really for the average Internet browsing person does that even matter? If I was an advertiser shelling out some of my precious dollars then I might just pay more attention to those results.

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