from Hacker News

Google is Doping the Horses

by cupcake_death on 10/10/11, 7:29 AM with 27 comments

• by patio11 on 10/10/11, 7:45 AM

  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.

• by jrockway on 10/10/11, 8:32 AM

  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.

• by buro9 on 10/10/11, 8:25 AM

  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.

• by socratic on 10/10/11, 8:34 AM

  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?

• by cloudwalking on 10/10/11, 8:02 AM

  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.

• by socratic on 10/10/11, 8:47 AM

  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.

• by dannyr on 10/10/11, 8:08 AM

  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.

• by wylie on 10/10/11, 7:56 AM

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