Who should decide search engine results?
It worries me that anyone would seek to manipulate search engine results. If it was your average everyday website owner and they were found out to be cheating the system, then they would soon find their site being penalised in search engine results. That is fair.
So why is it we have groups with a little more power seeking to manipulate search engine results for millions of sites in one fell swoop? That surely isn’t fair.
For reference, Mike Elgan explains how search engine results are derived at the moment. It is much more complicated than you might imagine and Google don’t directly affect the results themselves, except in special cases, like a website that is cheating the system and has a manual action applied, or a website that is breaking the law, or when someone has filed for their right to be forgotten.
Anyway, read Mike’s column. It’ll get those synapses of yours firing.
Originally shared by Mike Elgan
Who should decide search engine results? Users? Web site owners? Eurocrats? Google’s competitors?
(Read my column: http://goo.gl/Y676iw )
Europe recently filed formal charges against Google for violating European antitrust laws. Specifically, regulators say that when European users search for products, Google favors its own Google Shopping service over competing sites and services.
America’s own Federal Trade Commission (FTC) made similar accusations before concluding nebulously that Google did favor its own services, but consumer harm could not be proved.
Once you deeply explore Europe’s case against Google — or the FTC’s case, for that matter —an elephant always shows up in the living room, which few acknowledge: The issue isn’t about results that are fair or unfair, relevant or irrelevant, biased or unbiased.
The issue is: Who should decide what the results are when somebody searches Google?
http://www.eweek.com/cloud/who-should-decide-the-relevance-of-search-engine-results.html
#Google #Search #GoogleSearch #antitrust
