Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

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.

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.

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

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.

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.