
The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO  - HoneyAndSilicon
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/the-time-has-come-to-regulate-search-engine-marketing-and-seo/
======
hvs
Government regulation of search? So now we have a _right_ to be included in
the top of search results? Whenever someone says that "free trade has broken
down" you know what they really mean is "I want to use the government to my
advantage because I can't compete in the market."

~~~
ckinnan
Also, regulations tend to lock-in the current market structure.

The article ignores that Google has a robust new competitor, Bing (as well as
other new specialized options like Wolfram) and "search" itself is evolving in
social forms like Twitter and Facebook.

Innovators, as usual, are already working on solutions to today's perceived
problems.

~~~
wmeredith
_Also, regulations tend to lock-in the current market structure._

From the article: The anonymous author is an executive at one of the largest
sites on the internet.

Why wouldn't he want to lock in market conditions?

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jacquesm
Of all the nonsense that I've heard about government regulation this has to be
the #1 in a long long time.

If a search engine gets enough traction with the general public then there
will be people who will try to game the system. This will cause two things to
happen, the engines being gamed will adapt and those that don't will be
replaced by something better.

It's an arms race, and no amount of 'regulation' is going to curb it.

You might as well try to outlaw evolution. (I'm sure it's been tried
though...)

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byrneseyeview
If you read his opening analogy without thinking it was a reference to SEO,
you might assume it was about, say, books. I suspect that it's easier to get a
web page read than a book distributed (if the author of the essay would like,
we can have a race -- I will create a page and see if I can get it visited by
a major search engine faster than he can get a book sold at a major chain).

Maybe Google isn't doing a good job. Maybe SEOs (like me) are manipulating
search results in a way that's harmful to consumers. But in a capitalist
economy, the way you say "That could be done better" is to, well, do it
better. Or find someone who does it better, and use them instead of Google.

~~~
trickjarrett
Of course there are harmful SEOs, ones who play the system with malicious
intent. However consider that there are malicious marketers, malicious
politicians, and malicious forms of every other occupation. The government
does not regulate [all of] these.

At some point the government has to let the people govern themselves rather
than coddling and protecting them from themselves. Protecting from themselves
leads to an unhealthy government / citizen relationship.

[Edited to clarify text, added text in []s]

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trickjarrett
So search is broken and the solution is to bring our government into it to
monitor and regulate it? What about foreign based search engines?

This is bad all around.

~~~
eru
> What about foreign based search engines?

Tariffs. Especially if they do not respect our labour and/or environmental
protection laws.

~~~
trickjarrett
I do not want to seem snarky, but I can't tell if this is a joke or not. If
not, can you elaborate on what you mean? Would the government tariff foreign
search engines on a per search basis?

~~~
eru
A joke. But too close to reality to be comfortable, I guess.

~~~
trickjarrett
Ah good. I was 75% sure it was a joke, but thought I would double check. And
indeed, the fact that some of us weren't sure shows that it is something that
we could see the US government doing. _Very sad._

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wmeredith
The author is an executive at a private company and has anonymously written an
article calling for transparency, disclosure and government regulation in the
online search industry. This is utter garbage.

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old-gregg
His analogies portraying search engines as "borders" or "gates" are
ridiculous. Without search engines most of his "streets" or "islands" of
content won't ever be discovered by users. Pre-google Internet was small,
categorized and somewhat boring. Search engines don't create borders or gates,
they're expanding the "continents".

Moreover, I find google search results to be extremely accurate. Yes, some of
our competitors are ranked higher than us in organic search results. That's
because they've been around longer, their products have more reviews on
independent blogs and they have more existing users. Yes, as a user searching
for "XYZ" more often than not I mean to find the most popular "XYZ" at the
moment, not the most innovative startup that's trying to displace "XYZ".

What I don't like is Google's adwords system. If something's broken, you're
fucked and there is no customer service or an explanation what happened. It's
like me coming back home to find out that my landlord changed the locks and
won't pick up a phone number so I won't even be able to get my shit out of the
apartment. Yes, it's illegal for landlords to do that but GOOG can.

~~~
wmeredith
Google Adwords has kick ass customer service if you just have to know where to
find it (admittedly not a trivial undertaking).

1(866)2-GOOGLE (US Only)

More than once I've spent days going rounds with some sort of sophisticated
responder bot (or maybe it was an Indian, I honestly couldn't tell) on a
problem that was solved in minutes by calling that number. Now, I just call
first and skip the email support. I've never been on hold for longer than a
minute or two.

I hope this helps you in the future.

Love,

An SEM Account Manager in Kansas City

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yrb
I am not sure how regulation is really going to help anyone except the black
hat SEOs. If anything it will just make things worse by slowing down the
ability of google to respond to black hat SEO and creating a more bureaucratic
form of whose hand do I grease to get on the first page. I am not sure the
author really grasps the scale that they are playing, or maybe he is sick of
playing on that scale.

The author states that the only the large players can afford to reverse
engineer googles current ranking algorithm.

However I don't see how forcing them to publish the exact algorithms would
create any meaningful change for the "better". The big players will still game
the system if anything they will be more successful as they will be able to
move resources from reverse engineering to exploiting, and will have a larger
time frame where an approach is viable due to red tape.

The little guys will probably be just as bad off with roughly the same rule of
thumbs they have today.

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edw519
The Time Has Come To Regulate Techcrunch

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a2tech
SEO people can be good-but they really need to stop the whining. Google
doesn't owe anything to them-you don't hear Adware people for the PC
complaining to MS that they need to reveal all the internals of the OS so they
can better design nasty software do you?

~~~
jacquesm
I've long ago given up on google as a major source of traffic for anything
that I sell and I think that if that is your main strategy you are stringing
yourself up.

Just imagine, a 'regular' store that would depend on all it's business coming
from a single source referring customers. It can switch at will to send that
traffic to a competitor of yours, and your only guess as to why you are
getting this traffic is a bunch of coffee-grind staring individuals that claim
to have 'the inside track'.

If you have lots of google traffic because you have a premier listing in their
rankings then good for you and now work like the devil to get rid of that
dependency so that when - not if - the situation changes you are in control.

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mixmax
_That said, the primary methodology for all users to reach any individual
website destination is still search, of either paid or organic listings._

I don't know about that. I've had around 10.000 visitors to my blog in the
last few days. No paid search, and around 10 referrers from Google search. The
rest from social news sites, twitter, bookmark sites and other places that
have nothing to do with Google.

~~~
jacquesm
That's a healthy traffic balance. Contrast that with sites that depend for 90%
or more on google for their income.

~~~
mixmax
It's a spike, I'm not sure that was implicit in the post. I only get that kind
of traffic when I get myself together and actually post something, which isn't
that often.

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naz
The argument is flawed since Google derives its indexes from the links
contained within content itself. To use their metaphor: "Imagine if you went
to Los Angeles and the easiest restaurants to find were were those most
recommended by the the owners of the other places"

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thomasfl
All essential infrastructure on the net, like domain name servers, should be
regulated. Since search engines is becoming and essential part of the
infrastructure, it should be regulated too.

The European Union has sponsored a search engine project for some years now. I
would rather trust them than a private search engine company.

~~~
anamax
> The European Union has sponsored a search engine project for some years now.
> I would rather trust them than a private search engine company.

Is there someone stopping you from using said search engine? If not, your
complaint is not that you can't use it but that someone else isn't forced to
do so.

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adelle
Hey, let's regulate "e-mail marketing" while we're at it. Pfft. Whatever.

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euroclydon
Isn't search is becoming mature? And once that happens, will it be any
different than the Yellow Pages? Won't most of the talent exit the marketplace
and then it leave it to the bureaucrats and such?

~~~
tdoggette
Search was a "solved problem" before Google.

I doubt that something as basic as finding things on the web will lose all its
innovators.

