Seriously, what this guy wants is a search engine that promotes what he wants over what users want. He fails to understand that Google became popular specifically because it didn't do that.
There have been times in the past were Google's listings definitely were bad, like the whole Demand Media/content "farm" fiasco. The model of writing low quality and outright false content has largely moved from the how to articles on to news now, for better or worse.
The bigger issue is mobile means less results. A few ads and one or two visible organic listings. Google has to milk the hell out of desktop users to make up for lost revenue. If we move to voice search its going to really be different. You either dominate or get nothing, no in between.
Google has a model that works and makes a lot of revenue. They will not and can not innovate because those innovations will destroy the model. It is the same for any entrenched legacy corporation. Search is a good area to do innovative work in today.
Update: One other note. It was always clear to me that Google's business model was to provide huge volumes of free traffic, and then remove it. If you didn't buy traffic and you relied on that free organic stuff you were asking for trouble. Many companies have ranked organically for a term. Expanded, took on long term liabilities, and then lost their rankings and failed. Most of the business owner Google complaints we hear come from those type of people. You give someone a free drip of heroin, and then take it away and ask them to pay. They will not be happy.
If I am looking to fly somewhere, I probably don't want to be taken to United's or American's homepage. I probably want Orbitz or Hipmunk or some other site that will give me the comparison tools to make my own decisions.
His mistake lies in assuming that a hotel's site offers more value to users than the aggregators.
For those people I suggest they consider their fundamental reason for taking a vacation in the first place.
I think the prevalence of aggregation on holiday sites is simply causality of these companies not having a clear direction for their business. After all, it's easy to aggregate everything with the money and time to do so. But where is the value add?
You're asking for consumers to make significant decisions in what to them will feel like a position of ignorance. And you're asking for it because you think it will be profitable for you. Do you understand why I'm skeptical of this?
Do a search for a local hotel. I just did one. I counted 3 aggregator ads above organic results. 6 aggregator ads on the side, 2 other hotel ads on the side.
Organic listing #1 is the hotel, that is good. 7 other results are aggregators. 1 is the hotel parent company, 1 is an unrelated hotel.
What happens if you are a niche travel site, or a local blog? Your not going to rank. Your business model is now more or less dead.
He's saying that Google is a plutocracy, not a democracy.
I have an joke/axiom for social networks: "It's not really a social network if you can buy your way onto it."
A search engine follows the same principles. If I can pay a SEO professional to have my results promoted, then information is not truly being organized.
I don't think so. It's the fact that results are organized what makes SEO possible.
I don't think this statement is necessarily a good and logically sound axiom, and I think it applies to social networks more than search engines. I view it as a sort of a zen koan, in the vein of "It can't be all that avant garde if you're using a french word to describe it."
At the same time, I think this bears more scrutiny. Intent is important here. Your assumption is that Google organizes information, and that companies are organizing their information in a similar vein in order to facilitate better indexing. If this perfect world is the case, than your argument holds.
Unfortunately, I think the reality is frequently different. I think the vast majority of SEO use cases are not the organization of information, but rather the promotion of profitable information and damage control of potentially harmful informaion.
You may say to this that analyzing the motives of SEO is a deeply flawed venture, and you'd probably be right. But it is the difference between a system for organizing information and a beaurocracy which only a select few have the resources to navigate.
SEO is just gaming the system based on how search engines organize their corpus. It's a catch-22 situation, if you organize information, then somebody else can discover patterns in how you organize it and game the system. Based on that, I'd say SEO is evidence of organization.
To be fair, Google results have been very accurate for me lately (probably knows more about me than myself), specially since they use click and return rates in their ranking algorithm.
Is SEO really such a game-changer for non-tech people? Or am I being victim of SEO tactics without even being aware of it?
What amazes me is that you can actually "buy your way into Google" by paying ads... and it's the base of their business!
By way of comparison, I read a story not long ago where a restaurant owner blamed some incorrect hours of operation data in Google Places for a major drop-off in his business. Yelp reviews, on the other hand, told a story of food and service quality going downhill...
I don't really feel a need to rebut this desire, beyond saying "no".
You're reciting this as if it's obviously true, yet offering no evidence. If a scraper beats a site, it's not a logical conclusion that the scraper was more useful to the consumer than the original site.
The travesty isn't even perhaps brought about by Google directly. It may in fact be a reluctance of people to question the status quo or at least be heard in doing so. If nothing else, this blog is exactly what people need to deliberate over without prejudice toward the writer, and perhaps some knowledge or value will come from that.
Whatever it is, we're left with a fairly opaque 10 site list that people rarely delve beyond. And I hear the complaints already from some, sure it ever so slightly customisable, but I certainly haven't cared to do so for years.
The perceived problem with this is that what they think users wants doesn't always agree with what someone else thinks users want. Like in this article, where many users clearly want to see aggregators but the author believes they don't want to see aggregators.
He's not prescribing a solution. Much less the solution of Google becoming a "far-left government."
But screw equality and open access, right?
What is the perception of Google's neutrality in enforcement of rules against traffic arbitrage, e.g. search toolbars: http://www.benedelman.org/news/012213-1.html ?
Google? SEO agents? Large multinational corporations?
Wikipedia is subjective too, that doesn't mean that they just give in and let PR people manage the thing.
I don't know if this is true for everyone. It probably isn't. (at least it isn't immediately obvious.)
But for the author it is, and I agree wholeheartedly.
The word you want is "prescribe." To "proscribe" means to make forbidden or illegal. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
...which would of course render it utterly useless to those users and destroy any value it has as a search engine.
He even states that his main objection to Google search is that it is not acting as an artificial "leveller" to change society.
This is the manifesto of a far-left government. Google doesn't do these things because it's neither far-left nor a government, and his request is both poorly thought-out and quite bizarre.
It's almost like what Google did that made it popular!
Better for the consumer would be an aggregator which ranked properties qualitatively (first page for those with clearly genuine and excellent reviews) with those which do not get such good ratings further down the list even if they are more profitable for the aggregator.
In what way? How did the size of SEO and marketing budgets somehow become the result of consumer desire rather than a manipulation of it?
I don't know about you, but when I google "Las Vegas hotels", I don't want to be shown Rio, Palms, Bally's, or Mandalay Bay at the top. I want an aggregator so I can compare and make my own decision. The same applies to flights - there's a reason I use Hipmunk and Orbitz instead of united.com.
Aggregators can offer more value to a shopping consumer than a hotel's site does. That's why Google is giving users what they generally want - a shopping user wants the ability to make comparisons.
I don't. I'm not sure why you assume your opinion is universal. I want a bunch of hotels and their marketing pitches, then I want to go to my favorite aggregator to price compare.
All having the aggregators come up does is create an aggregation tax that every vendor has to pay - and each aggregator gives me a limited view of the market while giving the impression that it is the entire thing e.g. the lowest price on Orbitz is the lowest price amongst the people who pay Orbitz, not the lowest price, and since Orbitz takes a fee, businesses that pay Orbitz are going to be marginally higher cost than businesses who don't.
Those aggregators are just more gatekeepers. I prefer aggregators that perform a function for me, and are beholden to me only.
When you shop, do you only do business with companies that sell only their own products? Or do you buy your groceries form a store that carries multiple brands of milk?