If the shakedown theory is true, and I'm not sure that it is, that's an order of magnitude beyond the evil threshold.
Now I believe it is true, would not have believed it a few years ago. This Larry Page era is full of surprises, and lets remember that all his pet projects (Android, Google+, X etc) are tolerated by investors because earnings are being increased by 20%+ a year. So Google has to do all it can to increase CPC and number of clicks. The ads on pages have been maximized and then some so they need to resort to tricks and penalties for sites. IMO, this is done at senior level Google execs and then Search execs find the excuse to match search algorithms with what's most profitable for Google. So the lowly search engineer is "changing the world" as the execs count the ad clicks, CPC--and their stock options.
Who wrote this: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. " ? Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in academia.
>> One plus though, businesses still have the option of engaging their local community which may have a stronger effect than just search ads
The problem is that a lot of people use search to find companies, services and products. Getting frozen out of that is a major handicap. We should support alternative SEs so we have a healthy competition.
The Page and Brin quote is interesting. I searched for it and got the original paper (back when it was called "Backrub"). The relevant quote is in Appendix A: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a
I agree that we should support alternative SEs. The first step might be decoupling "Google" from "Internet" in the mindset for a lot of web users. I don't know if that's even doable at this point before tackling the "Facebook/Twitter = Internet" problem first.
Now I believe it is true, would not have believed it a few years ago. This Larry Page era is full of surprises, and lets remember that all his pet projects (Android, Google+, X etc) are tolerated by investors because earnings are being increased by 20%+ a year. So Google has to do all it can to increase CPC and number of clicks. The ads on pages have been maximized and then some so they need to resort to tricks and penalties for sites. IMO, this is done at senior level Google execs and then Search execs find the excuse to match search algorithms with what's most profitable for Google. So the lowly search engineer is "changing the world" as the execs count the ad clicks, CPC--and their stock options.
Who wrote this: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. " ? Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in academia.
>> One plus though, businesses still have the option of engaging their local community which may have a stronger effect than just search ads
The problem is that a lot of people use search to find companies, services and products. Getting frozen out of that is a major handicap. We should support alternative SEs so we have a healthy competition.