

Google is Doping the Horses - cupcake_death
http://exploreto.tumblr.com/post/11266458800/google-is-doping-the-horses
“You run the racetrack, own the racetrack, you didn’t have horses for a while but now you do and your horses seem to be winning.”
======
patio11
Google 2011 is not Google 2001 in many ways, some good and some bad. One way
which people haven't cottoned to yet is that Google 2011 privately realizes
that it controls navigation on the Internet and bakes this advantage into the
distribution strategy for every project they care about.

Did people not notice this when Chrome got front page billing? When Google
Video got thumbnails on the SERPS, expanded to YouTube once it joined the
family? When Google Maps/local got 50% of the screen real estate for local
queries? etc, etc

This frog is not being boiled. The bones dissolved, the water evaporated, and
the fire went out years ago.

~~~
aaronwall
Absolutely right on the money, as usual.

According to Compete.com, the % of downstream traffic from Google.com to
YouTube has roughly tripled since the first Panda algorithm roll out 7 months
ago.

------
jrockway
I don't see the problem here. If you are searching for "Guy Kawasaki", it
would make sense that his social networking profile would be among the
results. Yes, he uses Google for his social networking, but he seems to be
pretty popular there, and so it doesn't seem very farfetched for Google to
return his profile as a result.

Also, let's assume that Google is putting its own content before other
people's content. The Internet is open, so there's nothing wrong with this.
Your search engine can index Google (and the rest of the Internet), so just
use that one instead. Just because making a search engine is hard doesn't mean
that Google should be forced to not show its own content. If anything, that's
a reason why they _should_.

------
buro9
We all know that Google Search doesn't have an algorithm as such, it has
hundreds of signals that weight results for the positive or negative.

All we're seeing here is that Google have determined that Plus is a good
signal since they assume that their knowledge of that data can be trusted and
verified more than the data held by a third party.

They are probably right on that, so you can imagine that they would class it
as a very strong signal, such that against another resource with many weaker
signals the other resource loses and the Plus page ranks higher.

The only question is whether this is in some way a bad thing.

Is it bad to place a strong signal on one of your own properties?

To not place a signal would be equivalent to negatively placing a signal as
they most likely do have signals against other identity services (LinkedIn and
Facebook), but to place an equal signal is to say that you only trust your own
data as much as a third party - which is probably not the case, you trust your
own more.

To place a strong signal is probably correct in terms of your trust of the
data, but does raise the spectre of being questioned about whether this is
fair behaviour.

~~~
magicalist
exactly. I don't see this as that different than the unit converter or
whatever that best guess thing was recently (or including a map on a location-
like query, or a row of image thumbnails for popular celebrity names)...google
thinks you're looking for a person, and they have a person lookup service.
moreover, that service contains information populated by the people that you
can look up, which makes it more likely to be exactly what you are looking
for.

as buro9 said, the interesting questions have nothing to do with the (stupid)
doped horse analogy or whether this upsets some platonic ideal of a page-
ranked search index (in reality, they don't exist and no one would want to use
one).

the interesting questions are if google including this information is harming
competitors that would bring innovation to the market, whether that's even a
bad thing, long term, and if (somehow) preventing google from including this
would just hobble a mostly good product or would actually materially improve
things for consumers.

those are really hard questions, and asking them like this just diminishes the
level of debate that can be had about them.

~~~
cupcake_death
We, (<http://www.explore.to>) recently were penalized by Google for having
thin content. That is, we have business profiles that are yet to be claimed
and enriched by business owners, (As do lots of Google Places listings, (That
appear above the fold)). Yet, thin content via Google's own properties is
fine?
[http://www.google.com/search?q=Mark+Zuckerberg&pws=0&...](http://www.google.com/search?q=Mark+Zuckerberg&pws=0&adtest=on&hl=en&gl=US&ip=24.38.160.0&pws=0)

Zuckerbergs profile is adding nothing to the Google users experience, except
for visibility of G+.

------
socratic
I realize that in the SEO world, the standards of evidence are necessarily a
little less rigorous. But, what?

I mean, I'm totally inclined to believe that Google is somehow promoting G+,
but this does not strike me as convincing evidence. Neither does "I've seen
lots of other examples!" Is there some credible information to be had, here?

Frankly, the output for this query suggests to me that Google isn't doing a
very good job on this query in the first place. The photos of Guy aren't until
the second page of results, and for some reason AllTop (possibly for SERP
diversity reasons) is above many of his social media profiles.

Lastly, the G+ link is the seventh link. Only 50% of searchers even look at
what the seventh link is! Is the claim that they are just trying to juice the
results subtly?

~~~
cupcake_death
Opening this up to rigor by peer sharing. Where are the signals that all other
sites are subject to? Where is the crawlable structure, or the inbound links?

------
cloudwalking
The google.com domain has a better PageRank (10) than LinkedIn (9). Not saying
this totally justifies the ranking, but it certainly has some effect.
Especially if PageRank is a magnitude scale.

~~~
cupcake_death
plus.google.com is a subdomain and would inherit some value as linked from
Google.com - That doesn't justify the ranking of an internal page that's not
connected from the plus.google.com home page.

~~~
dannyr
I looked at the Linked profile vs Google+. LinkedIn has stale content while
the Google+ is often and recently updated.

To me that makes more sense.

Searching for my own name. Twitter & my own blog appear first because they are
updated more often than my Google+ profile.

~~~
cupcake_death
Zuckerbergs profile has no content. Yet his G+ profile ranks on the first page
of Google for his name.

------
socratic
I'm not sure if this article has gotten flagged out of existence, given that I
don't see it on the front page anymore.

But it seems a little fishy that the OP got a -50 penalty from Google due to
SEO, and now the OP is trying to get a blog post featuring one anecdotal data
point about Google's results being unfair to the top of HN, no? I mean, the
appearances seem a bit weird.

~~~
cupcake_death
Just pointing out what seems to be a hypocrisy

~~~
dannyr
By having only one instance to prove your point?

Show us more proof.

~~~
cupcake_death
[http://www.google.com/search?q=Mark+Zuckerberg&pws=0](http://www.google.com/search?q=Mark+Zuckerberg&pws=0)

~~~
dannyr
Do you have stats to prove that the inbound links of the lower ranked sites
are higher than Google+?

~~~
cupcake_death
In the case of LinkedIn vs. plus.google.com using Open Site Explorer, (Best
source I have) this has double the amount of linking root domains, a well aged
domain and a crawlable structure.

------
dannyr
Have you guys tried searching for "Guy Kawasaki"?

On my results, GK's LinkedIn profile is ahead of his Google+.

Google might be personalizing the search results.

~~~
citricsquid
I have a google plus account, but I never use it, I've only visited his
website once, as you can see by the purple links:
<http://i.imgur.com/xeULP.png>

If I scroll futher down you can see 2 more instances of google plus --
<http://i.imgur.com/1fHm5.png>, although I assume this is because I follow
both Tom Anderson and Vic Gundotra. However for me personally I couldn't give
a shit about g+ and it seems clear to me at least that they are (as the blog
author suggests) boosting the position of g+ just because it's a google
product.

~~~
dannyr
With yours, LinkedIn is below visualcv.

Not in my case.

I guess since people you follow on Google+ have shared something related to
Guy Kawasaki, that's why Google deemed it more relevant. It doesn't factor in
if you use Google+ or not.

They are not only doing that with Google+ but with Twitter too.

~~~
citricsquid
I switched to my other browsers running different google accounts, each
positions his profile on g+ in the same place. The only thing my account is
affecting is the bottom 2 g+ things.

opera, work account: <http://screensnapr.com/e/jZleuh.png> firefox, secure
personal account: <http://screensnapr.com/e/bTOdgq.png>

neither of those have google plus.

~~~
dannyr
His Google+ has 200K followers. His LinkedIn has 500+.

My guess is that his Google+ profile is more visited than his LinkedIn.

Maybe Google deserves some benefit of the doubt.

------
wylie
Big surprise. It's not even the first time they've done this (remember Google
profiles?)

