The War Over ‘Mother’s Day Flowers’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I honestly think Google should start a different 'business' section of the search engine that plays by different rules. That is ranked by custom satisfaction or price or something.
Otherwise the only ones who win are the SEO companies.
It's called "Google Shopping". The problem is, nobody uses it, so optimizing your business for it probably isn't going to be profitable. Because people search for products in the "normal" Google search, that's where the incentives to do SEO come from.
Personally, if I wanted to buy flowers, I would google for flowers and then search for each company that turns up to find reviews. If you really want to screw people like me over, you need shill reviews, not the #1 Google spot.
I'm so torn about this ongoing debate, on the one hand I understand Google's need to stop this kind of stuff, but on the other google game their own rankings with extremely poorly marked adverts (very, very light yellow barely distinguishable from the white of the search with an absurdly small 'Ads' in the top right corner).
No newspaper could get away with that and yet people scream about newspapers using outmoded models. The truth is that it's a lot more complicated, there's a lot of laws governing newspaper behaviours while Google can get away with murder. Google have recently done a lot of very, very underhanded and nasty advertising in recent years in my opinion.
Their monopoly really stick in my craw. It's like having only one high street in the entire world ruled by the Americans. Given the ever more extreme stances american political parties are taking, it's not going to be a good high street we're forced down for very long.
My only consolation it that at least they started from a fairly moral position so their gradual corruption is one from a good position. At least they're not Zynga.