Questioning Google’s integrity

If Google did decide to go the “bad” route who would make that decision? As with any big corporate company there are people employed in it’s ranks that may be unethical, but there are also people who are ethical. An “evil” decision may be made and implemented with its consequences delivered upon the world. But eventually the truth would come out. The overall good in people would see to this.

It may be devastating but it would be revealed, sooner or later. :fencing:

Well, google bought ebay.

Ebay shows up on every search.

Why? Because as part of the google family it knows how to optimise best for google…

Simple as that.

Ok, I misspoke.

Google and ebay joined forces, after a lot of squabbling you can follow if you search for it.

Here is what they did do:

http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=209064

in short:

The August 28, 2006 press release about the agreement (linked above) says, in part: “Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) and eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) today announced a multi-year agreement to benefit both companies’ collective communities of users, merchants, and advertisers around the globe. The agreement consists of two primary components involving text-based advertising and “click-to-call” advertising functionality.”

The press release continues: “Specifically, Google will become the exclusive text-based advertising provider for eBay outside the United States. In addition, eBay and Google plan to integrate and launch “click-to-call” advertising functionality that leverage both Skype and Google Talk globally in each company’s respective shopping and search platforms. The companies said the financial terms for certain components of the deal involve revenue sharing, but did not disclose specific details.

I disagree. I feel Google is trying to provide the best search results for search queries. Do not confuse their PPC advertising with search results.

A lot of folks expect Google to be like this “super god like entity”. There staff are human, just like you and me, and make mistakes, just like you and me.

I don’t feel they would purposely manipulate search results, with Microsoft and Yahoo wanting to snatch their share of the search query market at the slightest bad press Google would receive if this where true.

If you feel they are purposely manipulating the results give some good examples to back up your assertions. What you are saying is that millions of webmasters around the world are actually wasting their time with SEO. :hmmm:

Hi all,

I think Dom has it nailed.

My understanding is that it was a couple of kids who created google (do they still own the deciding shares?) and anyway I imagine if they are still deciding factors in the company that they’ve seen enough money to satisfy …

but then there is the old saying which doesn’t go this way … but its best I can remember … all powerful leads to all corrupt … the words ain’t right but the meaning is, and when you’ve had your fill of money and what it brings … and you are satisfied rather than one of those who couldn’t buy happiness … then what’s left? Power.

You can never have enough of that. So I think the theory has merit but also agree with Dom that they don’t need to cheat in terms of tainting the algos … they just plug in whatever keyword they’re shooting for and I imagine it pops out a nice little recipe for how many times keyword shows up, how many versions, how many links should be coming in to that page and from what type of sites …

I do find it curious that google ranks its own pages with numbers like 8 while most struggle to see a 5.

More curious is a search i did the other day (I can’t remember now for what) and google had a page about 5 or 6 ranking, and it was for a search that had nothing to do with them and I remembered thinking how odd it was their page came up because what on earth could they have to do with this?

I let it go and didn’t think more about it until now.

If i understand correctly on the linking thing … then your site should rank for keywords that are used to link to your site. I ask you? how many people link to google using any kind of keyword they’d be using to get traffic to their site? Unless of course you knew that it would help your ranking which might be the case since google seems to be an authority on at least some subjects that I felt they had no business with. (wish I could remember what i searched)

anyway … so people might be linking to google, but wouldn’t they just put up as their anchor text: “google” ?

I would. Hell if you don’t know what google’s about by now … you need to throw those eight track tapes away, turn off the rerun of I love Lucy and by ALL means get that mullet changed to something else.

so where I’m going with all that is that yes google is probably getting plenty of links incoming to it but how many of those are targeting any other keyword? let alone odd phrases they have no real reason to be showing up for.

someone mentioned to me (Sir BonusGeek) that right now he felt a lot of sites were showing up with just a bunch of links helping them that were coming in from all kinds of places (not targeted) but he felt they’d eventually fall out of grace.

But if you consider it from my point that IF google is wanting to rank for a wide variety of subject matter then their algo would have to be set up to give points to those with quantity of incoming links to have enough effect on SERPs so that their obvious mountain of unrelated links would still be able to compete successfully against legitimate sites for that keyword phrase (via content and targeted incoming links).

It would surely explain why BG felt there were a lot of sites with unrelevant incoming links (in quantity) ranking high. Because that’s the only way google could rank for phrases that are basically off-topic for their business model.

also curious is that I have seen membership sites with high page rank on the inside of the fence. What’s that about? if it takes a membership to get inside then why would google even allow that site’s inner-fenced pages be indexed?

Google has famously worked on the creedo:

“First Do No Evil”

They never make the end of that sentence public:

“to Our Stock Price.”

The notion that google is any different than the sort of monopoly that Bill Gates and crew created at MSFT is pretty funny. It took MSFT years and a number of bold moves to become a monopoly. It seems to me that once google took the lead in search traffic, their plans were set to be the next microsoft.

The google folks think of microsoft as the great evil, yet they are mirrors of each other. It’s like 1984 (the book), EastAsia, Eurasia, they’re both the same and for those of us in Oceania they are our enemies