Are we doing the right job by trusting search engines, for example, Google in everything it does? Is there someone adjusting the search engine results, overruling the algorithm? If Google has more than enough money, what’s their next goal? More power over the (online) world?
Just a few questions a colleague fired at me, once I mentioned that I’m a big fan of Google. First off, here’s what Google says about it’s integrity;
Google’s complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult. And though we may run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a particular or higher placement). A Google search provides an easy and effective way to find high-quality websites that contain information relevant to your search.
So Google claims to be as pure as it can be, besides the sponsored links. But there really isn’t a single person in the world, besides Google itself, who is able to check this. What if pages from certain websites always receive extra ‘points’ to get higher in the results, just because they donate a certain amount of money each month?
But perhaps we have to look beyond this. What if Google isn’t looking for more money, but for more power in the (online) world? What will the people from California do, in order to get more power? Perhaps I should state the question a little different; why should they stay fair and square if they can get more power (and money), the other way?
Why stay fair and square?
That’s the big question for me right now. Why should a big company like Google stay on the light side, if nobody is able to check if they really are as fair as the tend to be? Isn’t there a way to check if they do what they say, or a law to force them to do so?
All questions, that I don’t know how and who to answer. Perhaps we are not able to answer this due to the secrets that Google has. Or perhaps we are just starting a conspiracy. I don’t know.
I hate the fact that I’m trusting someone with my email, my favorite search engine just because the company claims to be fair. Hopefully I’m too careful, but I’m just not sure about this all and I have no reasons to be sure about this all. Can someone clarify this for me and clear the sky above my favorite search engine / email provider?
Disclaimer
I’m not claiming that Google is not as fair as they claim to be. As a matter of fact, as I claimed in one of the first sentences, I am a big fan of Google. It’s just that it got me thinking about this all day long. At first I didn’t want to post about it, but it kept me busy for the last few days.
So, if someone at Google reads this post and is 100% sure that Google is completely fair, let me know with some evidence and I’ll be more than happy to post a rectification!
Tags: google, integrity, money, power, search results
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Not an easy topic, I do know for a fact that Google influences organic searches by hand so now and then for important searches. There is simply a factor within the organic search results called Quality Factor, within that factor “site trust” has a great influence.. I think that a “super positive” site trust has a great influence
So this makes sure, Google does change the organic results by hand sometimes. Even if this is for ‘legal’ causes, it makes me even harder to believe that Google is 100% fair.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/288200.html
I like these quotes. Basically it says that people with more power will automatically become corrupt. Not sure if it is 100% true, but I think that someone who knows how to (easily) gain a little more power, will not hesitate to do the same thing over and over again. This results in greed to power and might make the step to a corrupt way-of-thinking a little smaller.
Added to Digg: http://digg.com/programming/Questioning_search_engines_about_integrity
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http://crunchlabz.com
Thanks for submitting it to Digg!
I absolutely believe that power corrupts. That is why there should always be competition. IF Google starts cashing in by selling organic results the search results will probably be less relevant for searchers.
By eroding their results people will start using other search engines. So if Google would like to be ahead of competition they shouldprovide better results for searchers. Providing paid results does not necessarily improve search results and may give opportunities to competition.
Do not forget that Google itself grew on the fact that existing search was easy to manipulate. Although Google has a lot of marketingpower, they are not untouchable.
If a new search engine (the new ‘google’) provides a good product at the right time customers will move to that new engine in a split second.
That is not untouchable is really true. But again, what if Google would alter the search results, without notifying us, the users? It would take ages before someone would notice if they proces it with caution.
It’s obvious that when it becomes clear that money does matter in the search results, many users of Google will leave and start using another search engine. But the trick is, that we don’t know if Google is doing this!
We wouldn’t know, that is right. But what is the problem then? Only if Google starts to provide bad results, people will leave. In the meanwhile Google can keep on providing the results their way.
It’s not really a free service, the people working for Google also need to be able to go to the grocery store.
Oeroek, so right. But Google is a really great search engine, we all agree I guess. Once they start to alter the results by themselves, bit by bit, we wouldn’t even notice! On the long term, if we compare the results with today and a year ago, we will notice slightly. But I think Google has more tricks than we know today.
Off course Google is not a free service. They gain an income through the advertisements and I guess with many more products. So why not, with altering the search results?
But again, I’m not saying Google is not fair, I’m just asking why we all trust the search engine blindely in what they say.
I do not trust anything on the internet blindly.
The page-ranks i also don’t get.
A simple example , the SMF board software have a pr of 7 , but phpBB.com have a pr of 5.
If you you do a quick search smf have a result of 379.000 and phpBB 3.540.000 , phpBB.com where change from a pr from 7 to 5 , i believe it was after the pr update about commercial links from a year ago.
So i don’t trust pr not really , and i really don’t get how Google judged particular sites for a PR , nobody but only Google can give it , so to my opinion the got a to big position on the search engine marketing, like Microsoft have a position on pc.
Personally, I think Google is getting poised to Take over the World! Coming to a headline near you!
JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
Some interesting points made here, but note that Google is a business and they don’t have to give transparency. It’s the visitors who should be more cautious.
http://www.sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-censorship.php
Google is known to remove items from the index, so inherently there exists a system to alter search results. Even if it’s brute force, it still represents an ability to massively alter results.
Another way to find out if Google is changing the results of things is to find another search engine that supposedly doesn’t change the results but otherwise has the same rules. I wonder how easy it is to create a search engine; If it were easy you could make your own search engine to compare google with.
Google doesn’t tamper with the results because it’s not in their economic interest to do so. If they did tamper with the results, do you really think no one would be able to tell? It’s a huge site with millions of visitors and all of these news sites (like this one) watching their every move very closely. Do you really think no one would notice? Look at what happened to Comcast recently. People were certainly able to figure out what THEY were doing to their customers connections. And look what happened to their reputation as a result. Google is too smart to let that happen to them. The small amount of money they could make selling better placement of search results pales in comparison to the amount of money they would lose if people found out they were doing it, and they know it, so it’s not going to happen.
I use a search engine because over the time i have used the internet I have made a concious decission on what search engine delivers the correct content based on my search terms. I have optimized the way i search and I can find almost anything i need instantly. I myself use google and don’t question there integrity because they deliver the search results im looking for. I think everyone should use whatever search engine delivers what they want.
I don’t suspect google of foul play but i guess it would’t surprise me either though just look at how much mainstream media is manipulated I’m sure theres evil lurking in the shados trying to control citizen journalism also
Geeze I just don’t believe it,
why would anyone want to control information in the information age?
You think Ma- Bell was bad –
Google also filters searches to prevent “Google bombs” against defamation among other things. A while back, if you Googled “idiot” or “miserable failure”, your first hit would be an anti-Dubya page. Even though this does somewhat ensure “relevance”, it is contradictory to the original PageRank model that Google was developed around. So Google’s search integrity has, in essence, been diminishing over the years as these “filters” have been added (don’t get me wrong, I’m a Google lover as well).
In regard to your main question: I believe, just as oeroek, that you cannot trust anything or anyone on the Internet. You can’t trust anything at all for that matter (online or offline). There is always going to be someone (or something) out there with ulterior motives. However, as long as Google remains fast, comprehensive, and accurate, people will continue to use it.
EDIT: That’s exactly why I didn’t leave my REAL email address when submitting my comment. I don’t trust your website!
I agree, it’s best not to be naive. I’ve been monitoring the story selection and placement on the news pages because they’re powerful editorial techniques. Google’s refusal for many years not to acknowledge Memorial Day and their lame excuses for not doing so revealed much about the personality. As you note, they make their money on advertising. How many advertisers do we blindly trust? (If you want a vaguely google inspired song, here’s one: http://snipurl.com/2m1mg)
hmmm.. well this is how i see it.
if you are really searching for a topic you need accurate information on, you wouldnt use only google. Simple because different algorithms will get you different results. second, other search engines are typically partnered with (or owned by) lieing cheating corporations - which from the beginning implies that you should not trust THEM. Thrid, what has google actually DONE that has discredited their honest policies? obviously not much since they are still by far the most popular search. Fourth, i would rather be fed nonsense from google than other companies. Why? because they dont want money, they dont tell me what to believe, and they dont give me any reason to doubt them. You cant possibly tell me thats true for your other search engines. Simply being owned by a huge corporation (MSN owned by microsoft for example) means to me that the search will favor that corporation (and lets all be honest here, microsoft is not exactly a saint of a company, i’m sure you’ve been upset over a microsoft product recently - how about vista? or office refusing to adopt open source documents? the list goes on and on) - what has google done to make you question its integrity thus far? How much have you had to pay for google’s services? if you dont like google, dont use them, nobody is forcing you, nor are you paying for it. So there, i said it. if you dont like them - dont use them. the world will move on.
Enter - find chuck norris - in Google’s search field:)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but google already has hundreds of people who manually check results, and if results are not relevant for the phrase, because the algorithm got it wrong, or if its just some sort of affiliate scheme, they do adjust it, which weights on the result. I don’t think, however, that they move anything up, they either keep it there, or remove it if its irrelevant.
What I’ve noticed is that Google has much power, but mostly when it comes to search. if you noticed, froogle didn’t do so well, and this was their ultimate test because if they were able to become like amazon for product search, this would have been extra few billion in their pockets.
Similiar with video google, they had to go with youtube, and blogger for blogs.
So, althought they have great power with search, I definetly agree, they are very limited in their switching territory in terms of extra add-ons that their customers will use.
We will see in the future if they try anything else to increase revenue, but it seems there plan is to expand their websites, to beyond google.
If they can play this out, sure they can do what they want with results, but while their revenue largely depends on the words, and advertisers, their integrity is in check, and I still think even if it didn’t it still would be in check, because it only takes one mistake to ruin integrity.
Just my opinion, open to criticism =)
Well csomeone has probably read this from Google, it hit the front page of Digg…
As a retailer, I have found search engines impossible to get on my side. Many companies guarantee SEO results but I wonder who among them actually succeed - for a reasonable sum.
Sometimes I wish that search engines would level the playing field. In other words for any given search, present results in a randomized way. Frankly, I may not be interested in Google’s opionion of what constitutes “relevant” result for my query. Perhaps I am interested on something on the 20th page!
And furthermore, why shouldn’t my business enterprise have as much of a chance of “getting listed” on the first page as my big-bucks competitor? The result of this “popularity bias” means the big fish get bigger and the small fish die of starvation.
bueno, me podrian explicar como funciona este programa gracias :d
Google will not return torrent results, or results about digtal files.
The matter of the fact is that a leading CS professor, Alexander Tuzhilin, looked into the ad algorithm (because of the click-fraud scandal) and said that the entire thing was clear, efficient and clean.
Most corporate images, symbols, logos, and graphics exhibit occultic characteristics which reflect illuminati and Freemason secret societies which borrow from Cabalistic origins. Our dollar bill is one such example i.e. the all seeing eye atop a pyramid with latin words that have nothing to do with the USA or our constitution, etc. How are we treated by the government today? Is there integrity in congress?
Today, 6/20/08, Google’s organic (always in flux) front page graphic depicts the sun gleaming through one of the O’s in Google masked by what may, only in my opinion, represent a chemtrail. Those that worship the sun are said to be occultic, or satan worshipers according to Texe Marrs in his book Codex Magica. After reading that book, and others like it, I can pick out representations in almost every corporate graphic and staged photographs of people using occultic body language and hand signals. Google implements different symbol sets everytime the graphic changes.
MSN’s LIVE subscriptions once exhibited a graphic image of what appeared to be a celestial sunrise.. what one would see when in space as if the sun was rising over the earth’s horizon, was actually rising over the moon. The moon has no atmosphere, yet there was refraction over the horizon and different than that of the earth. This is because there is a theory that ancient desecrated dome structures that are fragmented remains are refracting the light rather than any atmosphere on the moon. It is said that that the powers that be are hard at work keeping this a secret. Yet they float the truth right in front of our eyes as a joke on us.
The question is why? And why was the LIVE graphic since removed? Most likely because this astonishing link was discovered by someone else. The point is - they try to establish conditioning images for us. The real point relative to whether Google is honest is: They can’t be if they are hinting us with images that reflect a belief system unlike that which is generally accepted cross culturally in the USA. Just an opinion of course. Let’s see what image Google presents tomorrow and the next day…
Thanks for making a bunch of stupid assumptions about a great company.
Google has more than proven itself as a respectable company by the way it supports net neutrality and helping those who need help. They also provide a lot of free quality services.
No other company “proves” any of their technologies to you, yet you still accept them. So don’t question Google, that’s simply blind and ignorant to pick on a respectable company.
More so, if you feel like Google is a great company (like you said in the article), why did you take the time to make Google look like a data manipulative controlling company? Your not hurting their reputation, just making yourself look ignorant.
Front page baby!
Had blogged about google and other search engines, their effects on exchange of ideas.. and how it is making us zombies…. http://www.arbitblog.com/2008/06/search-engines-are-search-engines-and-that-is-all/
regarding the trust factor… we always trust someone or the other… and that is how life works…
we trust teachers to give good education and friends to fall back on….
we are so used to thinking that people do anything for money(perhaps most of us do..) but unless there is proof to be believed.. lets trust google..
search engines are self serving entities. Just look at the recent DEWEY update… the only thing ive seen change of any significance (apart from a load of my sites dropping down a few pages) is the emergence of Google Books in a 1-4 spot. I guarantee that once Knols goes live the following update will ensure its prominence above Wikipedia which currently holds top spot for almost anything.
Thats why search engines have ZERO integrity.
@Raimon, the difference between SMF and phpBB is really strange. phpBB has a rel=”external affiliate” for all commercial links. I don’t know what the affiliate relation is, but shouldn’t those links be no-followed? Perhaps this is the cause?
@Guru Squasher, so true. It’s a fact that Google does not have to be transparant. I guess that the secrets about the Google algorithm are due to the fact that this is the key to succes for Google. They should be fools if they made that public!
@anonymouse, thanks for that link, I’ll read it through once I write my follow-up post for this one!
@K9, I guess that building a search engine (as big as Google) is hard after all. Never wondered why there is no (real) competition for Google?
@chris, it’s not just the order of the search results what I’m questioning. But if you use it in such a large scale as the biggest search engine (Google) on earth, it could be quite costy.
@dancobb60, great view on it all. But what if content is available at two different spots? For you, as a user it does not matter where you’re going. But for the site that you’re being linked to, it’s a major difference. Google will notics that and should be able to make some money out of it!
@Jason, the Google bombs are the biggest example why I’m doubting the honesty of Google. They alter the results for that kind of events, why not for a large amount of money?
@everysandwich, why should I want to trust an advertiser? It’s Google that I’m ‘doubting’ about!
@sean, you say that you trust the results again because Google is such a open and attractive search engine. But if you can’t spot a fault of Google, that doesn’t mean that you can trust it!
@Lee, easter eggs are plenty on the internet, even in Google!
@Gene, if Google adjusts the results in a negative way, why shouldn’t it alter the results in a positive way? We do the asumption that it is this way, but is it the truth?
@Scotttech1 publicity is always welcome, also from Digg off course!
@Don Klotzbeacher, SEO results can’t be garanteed I guess. Most companies do know what they are talking about, but a real 100% result is nearly impossible. Google sets it’s relevancy as public relevancy, but I guess that it’s different for each and everyone. Perhaps not to be judged about by Google, but working so far for most people!
@Jerry, they actually do return these results. Try it!
@Bobby, but that was about the sponsored links right? I’m talking about the organic results.
@Andrew, I´m not saying Google is bad. I admit that I use Google all day long, I love it. But you are making the assumption that Google is great, because of the great things the company does. But we´re not aware of most of things that are going on there!
@Pachi, the world relies on trust. That doesn’t mean that you have to trust everyone, right?
@mark rushworth, Knols is a great example. Once Google’s encyclopedia goes live, is Wikipedia remaining at the first spot? YouTube replaced most video sites now, why will Knols not go the same way?
But Google is Walmart. It provides results that will fit the most people, most of the time. Google cannot hit all the niche uses. I go to Walmart when I want a generic set of pots and pans. If I am a professional cook, I do not step in the door. The potential for smaller, focused search engines to take chunks of people at a time from Google is huge. And I think we have yet to see different algorithms for search results. And for those that say no, I invite you to a meeting of the flat earth society and a showing of the famous “studio moon landing”.
I have found I use Google less and less over time, unless of course I am looking for the generic, run of the mill type information or spam, because Google is great at spam.
Plus my biggest bitch is that Google corrects my name. No matter how many times I tell them I am not “stephen miller” they still through the results in. An example of their tendency to override the wishes of there users.
I trust google.