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Re: Rise in Selfish Search Engines

__/ [www.1-script.com] on Monday 29 August 2005 19:57 \__

> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> 
> 
>> There seems to be some intersting rumours regarding reversal of a boost
>> due
>> to Bourbon Update.
> 
>> http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/30370-18-10.htm
> 
>> <snip>
> 
>> "One of the things I noticed with bourbon is large sites with
>> Adsense had a
>> boost, it now appears that there has been a rollback/update."
> 
>> </snip>
> 
>> It may not be related to penalties, e.g. rotation of a link 'pool'.
> 
>> Roy
> 
> Thanks for the link, Roy. I admit, the 33-page discussion on such a heated
> topic is hard to follow, but I tend to side with what seems to me to be
> the main theme of this discussion: at least some (degree is debatable)
> details of Google's algo will be related to their business goals since
> their IPO.


Which is /exactly/ what I pondered about 3 days ago. How can they prevent
becoming a so-called evil/vicious company when there are greedy investors
yelling for increase in profits? I think the IPO was a stupid idea for them
Open Source lads. Not surprisingly, Page was wearing a frown the day of the
IPO. He's no idiot.


> Maybe I just feel a bit cynical today, but having been working
> for big corporations before I just cannot see how Google can be completely
> free of all that end-of-quarter, end-of-year,
> just-before-the-annual-report and other rushes that other public
> corporations suffer form. After all, all you need to do is to flip a
> (virtual) switch...


They might wind up having a money-versus-benevolence dilemma. While I like
Google very much, I am a little apprehensive and maybe even cynical like
you. Look at the way Yahoo, being a proper profit-making company, favour
companies that pay to be listed. My site is not profit-making, so how can
it receive deserved attention while somebody else is waving the dollars? I
hope this gets rectified.

One of the reasons why I fear MSN is that they have their own agenda and can
blacklist Linux-friendly sites or drop them from the indices shall they
wish to do so. Who would stop them? The government that harbours software
engineers that have money flow Washington's way?

A long time in the past I raised the idea of an open search engine that the
public will support, much like ICANN. It may not be ideal; it might even be
poor in terms of results that get returned. It would at least put an end to
bias[1] and I can assure you I would use it exclusively. For the very same
reason the W3C was put in place. Does _anybody_ ever use a commercial
validators? 508? Well, that's arcane... and it appears to be .gov/.org
anyway. 


[1] ...and no... no companies will be able to fund it like Google and
Mozilla/DMOZ do... no money under the table for search bars, directories
and mutual recommendations.


> Is Google the only one guilty of making SERPs decisions with business plan
> in mind? I certainly don't think so. I've talked to some webmasters
> complaining about Yahoo lowering ranks of AdSense-rich sites starting
> couple months before their own context-ad network announcements. Claims
> like that are hard to prove, but they make oh-so-much sense (no pun).


Strengthens my point, I hope.

 
> Rotation of the link pool is probably worth its own thread, which I'm
> going to start shortly.


Please do. Banishment on this is probably a desparate attempt to apply a
type of linear discriminant to detect spammy site. Try to mail someone you
haven't talked to before with a blank subject line... or HTML... or ALL
CAPS... you'd be lucky to penetrate the filters...


All the best Dmitri,

Roy

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz        "I think I think, therefore I think I am"
http://Schestowitz.com

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