The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO | Hacker News Reader

The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO

techcrunch.com

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."

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.

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?

I'd still like to see more competition than Google vs. Bing...

But Google's brand-power is really a strong asset at this point. At this point, I almost like Bing more for wearing away at Google's mind-share than Google's market share. (Of course, one comes with the other.) Maybe Bing's existence will open the door for some new start-up to make a dent.

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...)

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.

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]

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.

> What about foreign based search engines?

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

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?

If that wasn't a joke, then it was depressing.

I'm choosing to be optimistic.

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

The best kind of joke.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Time Has Come To Regulate Techcrunch

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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"

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.

No it shouldn't.

> 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.

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

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?

Search was a "solved problem" before Google.

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

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