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Comment by SlyShy | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch: The pages using Google Places are unfairly being put at the top.

Another explanation: The savviest webmasters (who promote their sites best, know SEO, etc.) are the first to play with a new tool like Google places, which is why you see their pages so highly represented in the top results.

This is another case of correlation vs. causation, something that journalists seem incapable of grasping.

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It is more than just places. Search for 'windows 7' and one the top results is a google product page that is nothing more than an aggregation of others pages. On it's face this seems fine, but google tells others that they don't want their search results linking to what is essentially another pages search results. Unless of course that other page of search results is a google product.

Here's another example, I've always dominated a vanity search for my name (it's an uncommon name). One day out of the blue I wasn't the top result, some with my name was simply because they put a video on YouTube and being a google product it gets special treatment.

> because they put a video on YouTube and being a google product it gets special treatment

How do you know it gets any special treatment? Didn't it occur to you that because so many sites link to YouTube it can be perfectly natural that it has a high PageRank?

I didn't explain the situation well. It didn't show up as an organic result, it showed up as a "videos for xxx".

But, the product pages are a much better example. I should have left it at that. They are showing links to their product pages that are essentially a page of aggregated search results. This is something they actively try to prevent when the aggregated search results pages belong to someone else.

> The savviest webmasters (who promote their sites best, know SEO, etc.) are the first to play with a new tool like Google places, which is why you see their pages so highly represented in the top results.

By savviest webmasters you mean Google, since they generate the pages. Yes, they have very good SEO. Nonetheless, in many places this is deemed unfair competition

I'm not sure how that answered the parent's point. SlyShy claimed that the pages who are at the top of search results are more likely to be tech savvy, and therefore more likely to use Google Places (and therefore have a link to Google Places next to their search result). I think that's an interesting alternative explanation, although obviously we can't really tell whether the parent's interpretation is more accurate than TechCrunch's or not without looking at data.

I don't understand what you meant though. Can you clarify please?

and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but don't a lot of those places results look autogenerated? if you click on the more results link, every single local result has a places link.

I think the author jumped the gun.

Just because they're auto-generated doesn't change the fact they're taking traffic that previously would have gone to another site and pointing at their pages.

so they're not evil?

Google? Or journalists who don't follow basic logic rules?

Don't be so harsh, I think Eric is onto something. Or do you think it is normal, that for the "NY Chiropractor" search, first 7 "organic" results are listed in Places, while all the rest are not? That's clearly a bias and now we see the search results are not sorted by relevance, as Google always claimed to be the case.

You assume it's a bias, but you provide no compelling argument that the results on the first page aren't the best results for the query. And neither does the Tech Crunch writer.

No kidding.

Searched for: "ny chiropractor". First page results: all NYC chiropractors. Seems like accurate, relevant results to me. Meanwhile, the first 4 Bing results are: a college, an association, an actual NYC chiropractor, and a Wikipedia page about the college.

I find the high-rank-due-to-emphasis-on-online-presence theory far more likely, actually. Especially as they seem to be targeting Google SEO.

Even if the theory that "smart webmasters use Google tools" is true, this indicates that Google is creating products that make it easier to gamble the system. This doesn't sound like it is helping web users, just the opposite.

> the search results are not sorted by relevance

I don't think it's safe to assume that enrollment into places has no effect on real-world relevance.

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