Google is Doping the Horses
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“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.”
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zuckerbergs profile is adding nothing to the Google users experience, except for visibility of G+.
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?
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.
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.
Show us more proof.
On my results, GK's LinkedIn profile is ahead of his Google+.
Google might be personalizing the search results.
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.
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.
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.
My guess is that his Google+ profile is more visited than his LinkedIn.
Maybe Google deserves some benefit of the doubt.