Stuck In Google's Doghouse

hansoloaf writes "The NY Times is running an article about a business, Sourcetool.com that seem to be in a sort of a doghouse with Google. Initially Sourcetool uses AdWords to help build up its business. The business centers around providing links for business that sell industrial products. The owner, Dan Savage, explains in detail how Google over time used its AdWords bidding system to limit or reduce Sourcetool's ranking and revenue because the site's landing page is not 'googly' enough. Savage wrote a letter to the Justice Department as they are reportedly looking into Google and Yahoo's proposed deal." The article is nuanced in its observations about the complexity and ambiguity of anti-trust law. Even if Sourcetool and similar businesses aren't "Googly" — which is a Google proxy for "what the customer wants to see in search results" — should Google be able to pick winners and losers among industries and business models?

Why not just improve the site?

The Dan Savage [avclub.com]? Love your work.

But surely google must serve its customers in the way it deems best. Otherwise, who is running the business?

Solution? Make your website less like a link-farm. Perhaps add some value, like trustable reviews, or customer recommendations (otherwise, the site is not really any different to a Google search on the term "Industrial Products").

"Googly" -- which is a Google proxy for "what the customer wants to see in search results"

Which is, of course, why Google is the No.1 search engine. They make serving their customers their business, the crazy loons.

Re:Why not just improve the site?

His website relied on being a link-farm.

From The Summary: The business centers around providing links for business that sell industrial products.

The summary is wrong it should say "AdSense Links".

Basically, he was skimming from Google. He was paying google less for search terms than Google was paying him for click throughs. If you typed "ball bearings" on Google you might get one of his adwords (that he paid 5-6 cents for), then clicked on one of his "ball bearing" you'd be clicking on a Google AdSense ad (that he was paid 10cents per click through). He was making a huge amount of money by making people click twice through what Google would prefer to be a single click from their system. Plus his entire business model relied on skimming cash from Google.

Re:Why not just improve the site?

The site still looks like a link farm. And every page basically has paid links on it that just repeat the search terms he was paying Google to buy. There's no reason Google should sell him search terms cheaper than they pay him for click throughs on the same search terms.

Re:Why not just improve the site?

Yes, except you've forgotten a critical point... Companies who advertise and pay them money are their customers, not the masses who use their services for free.

Re:Why not just improve the site?

Yes, except you've forgotten a critical point... Companies who advertise and pay them money are their customers, not the masses who use their services for free.

I didn't forget this- It isn't a critical point though-

How would Google be serving its customers by filling up the search results with link farms? In my eyes, that only devalues the product.

This site, as a poster above points out, is simply skimming cash from Google.

Re:Why not just improve the site?

They are the customers, but nevertheless it may be a good business decision to get rid of bad customers.
If some customers are given cheap ads to irrelevant pages, the free users (Google's product) will start clicking on the links less, and thus reduce the value of Google's services their other customers.

Since this is Slashdot, every post needs a bad analogy. This case is similar to a restaurant throwing out a paying customer (or charging them *a lot*) if they are loud, annoying and disturbing many other eaters.

Re:Why not just improve the site?

Bingo...

The website is a link farm. and it's a whiney butt complaining that their semi shady business is pissing off google.

Honestly, I think any link-farm site needs to be delisted.

"googley" stands for a honest and real website and not a site page that is designed to list links to other places purely to build google page ranks for other sites.

That's a false dichotomy.

If they have nothing to sell to their customers, then they won't make very much money, will they.

But that's not how things work when you're a monopoly. Or even a company with only eighty percent of the market. Your product doesn't have to be ideal, just good enough to keep competitors from spending the billions of dollars and years of coding to even try to catch up. Google is now so big that their energy usage alone affects the budgets of entire counties. Looks to me like you're assuming that somehow if they don't do the best possible job, competition will somehow magically take care of it. That it's a choice between "nothing to sell" as you put it, and putting out a flawless product. Well, first of all, there's a huge range between "nothing" and "best". Secondly, when the barriers to entry [tutor2u.net] are measured in billions of dollars and tens of thousands of programmer years of work, it's not realistic to expect that somebody will somehow just step in and supercede Google if they do something wrong.

Now, maybe you're thinking as you read this about Yahoo, MSN, and so on. Well, have you ever used their search engines in the past five years? I run web sites so I have to. They suck. I'm not even going to bother to explain why Microsoft would f*ck up a programming job; anybody posting here should get that already. But if you look at the others, they're somewhere between bush league and simply not built as general purpose search engines. Ask Jeeves and Yahoo are built for ignorant, clueless lumps who want everything explained to them in small words. Search on anything there and you'll reliably end up at sites with a fifth grade vocabulary and lots of "for dummies" style handholding.

What's my point? That their engines aren't even built to do what Google's does. To say that they still compete head to head with Google is like saying that Cliff Notes is competing with Encyclopedia Britannica. This means that in some ways, Google is already a monopoly and I'm willing to bet that the programmers in those companies who study how each other's code works would agree with me. They offer, superficially, the same product, but not to the same markets and not for quite the same uses.

Make no mistake; I use Google,too. Their results are fantastic. But just as I avoid posting links to Wikipedia, I go out of my way to find things in other ways than Google. As the article points out, power corrupts, monopoly power especially. And whether the folks in Google still believe after their cooperation with the Chinese government and their retention of personal data and so on that they are free from "evil" to use their own term, they will become a problem, a censoring, privacy infringing, overcharging danger to, quite literally, the entire human race if they keep going the way that they're going now.

Re:That's a false dichotomy.

Ironicly using Igoogle, clicking on this article and only this article brings up a google error. Had to actually visit slashdot to get to it. Coincidence or nefarious plot?

Re:Why not just improve the site?

...They make serving their customers their business, the crazy loons.

And yet keywords are auctioned off to the highest bidders, which goes againt delivering the most relevant search result. Add that Google is an effective monopoly - i.e., wields predominant market power.

Saying that "keywords are auctioned off to the highest bidder" is so incomplete that it's basically wrong. The auction process does include a monetary bid, but auction is massively affected by something called "Quality Score."

If Site A bids $5.00 for the keyword "dog house", but its landing page has nothing to do with "dog houses," its ad will either not be displayed, or will be displayed well below Site B who bids $0.05 but has a landing page that is all about doghouses. Landing page/keyword relevance, responsiveness of the advertiser's web server, and previous click-through rates for that advertiser ALL are factored in when Google decides in what order to place the ads. In fact, if Site A has a history of very low CTR ads that aren't relevant to the keywords on which it bids, it will have to overcome a low quality score for ALL of its ads--it'll be "guilty until proven innocent."

Not so simple once you really think about it

At first I thought this was going to be yet another "SearchKing"-like whine with cheese about how unfair Google was being to some sleazy parked domain hoarder. But that's not quite the case. Make sure you RTFA. I think the guy's website is relatively useful and well-organized. It sure doesn't feel like the usual AdWord gaming scheme.

I get the sense that Google is being hoisted by its own petard here. The fact that the article mentions the site in question might be in direct competition with one of Google's main partners is definitely interesting, coupled with the allegation that he knew of at least one other website who got a pass from the algorithm after being evaluated by a human being.

Here's an example. I searched for wood cutting [sourcetool.com] on Sourcetool. That's a pretty relevant list of results if you're a business looking for that kind of equipment. Now run the same [google.com] search directly into Google. See the problem? Yeah, the 5th hit is a Runescape page, for cryin' out loud. I'm sure I could possibly refine the search, but think about the ads that show up on the right side of the page. A link to Sourcetool and five seconds later I'm looking at what I actually needed.

Maybe Google is nervous about niche search solutions? I'm just not seeing their problem here.

If the article is correct, Google is not acting on good faith. To all the people who screamed about how Google is not a monpoly and made Microsoft jokes when Slashdot ran the Yahoo deal antitrust investigation, remember that Google does have more than 70% of the online ad market, and then put yourself in this guy's position. What are your options? MSN ads? You're screwed, because you can't take your business elsewhere.

And I have to say I was astounded at the money amounts mentioned... $600K per month? I'm definitely in the wrong business!

Re:Not so simple once you really think about it

When I go to a search engine and ask it to find me something, I don't want to be taken to another search engine that might find me what I want. I want it to find me what I want.

Except that, not

Did you bother to actually look at sourcetool.com? Multiple keywords, all unrelated to each other, each with the same anchor tag. He's a whiner.

Google is now used like a bookmark or type ahead.

No. It only suggests that there continue to be plenty of people doing a given search for the first time. It's a big ol' world out there and you can be pretty damn good at what you do and not have everybody on the entire web already know about you and where to find you. On top of everything else, I've found that many people no longer bother to remember exactly the name of a site. They just remember enough to be able to find it with Google over and over and over. I've seen it done by people going to my own site, with me standing right there. They say, "okay, what's your site again? Something about streetcars and space and..." while they type into the Google window that's a default part of their browser. Using Google has become like a remote operated kind of type ahead or like bookmarking in many people's habits so sometimes even if a site is liked and used frequently, if it's not high up in Google's results, as far as many people are concerned, it will be gone.

Re:Not so simple once you really think about it

I liked the article a lot too, and it's certainly true that someone who is operating a search business is in a tricky position. As I read it he grossed $650K monthly on click revenue, and paid Google $500K a month for keywords.

How much value is the site providing in between clicks? I searched it in a couple areas where I've had to find and buy materials or equipment. I would say not real useful, and far from complete. If you're seriously sourcing stuff for a business, you soon learn who the main manufacturers and distributors are, and if you google, you don't google for a broad category, but for a part number or the narrowest possible technical descriptor. Maybe if you're just starting out and with no idea who sells widget-grinders this would give you some initial places to look.

Other readers will be savvier on this, but the site really looks like it was generated by software with minimal human intervention. I certainly get no sense that experts in particular areas had any hand in making the categories. The guy's business model depends on being widely spread across a whole lot of categories, which pretty much precludes paying for the in-depth expertise that would make it really helpful.

Re:Not so simple once you really think about it

Here's an example. I searched for wood cutting on Sourcetool. That's a pretty relevant list of results if you're a business looking for that kind of equipment.

Except that every link is to a business.com redirector. Aside from the linkfarm site design going on, the redirect for every link is a big, spammy and red siren for me.

A right to revenue?

Does a company have a right to revenue? If they base their business model on the rules of another company, do they really have recourse when the rules are changed to damage that revenue stream?

And can anyone point me to a bit torrent of an actual Miley Cyrus CD instead of garbage binaries?

Re:A right to revenue?

And can anyone point me to a bit torrent of an actual Miley Cyrus CD instead of garbage binaries?

Indeed. If I want to search for ball bearings, I want google to first give me the search result of a real ball bearing producer or store. Not have to click additional links to ad-ridden garbage pages that might eventually lead me to a ball bearing producer (or not).

Google should be busy optimizing their product (which is views by users who also click on advertisements). This guy is making money from a google algorithm, if it changes for the better, he should change with it. Where is the big deal.

Re:A right to revenue?

And can anyone point me to a bit torrent of an actual Miley Cyrus CD instead of garbage binaries?

As the parent of a pre-teen girl who has said CD, let me assure you that you're drawing a distinction that does not exist.

Googles value is in picking winners and losers

Making a long list of websites containing a specific phrase is fairly trivial. Finding interesting ones among that set, or in other words, picking winners and losers, is the reason Google (and other search machines) exists at all.

So yes, they damn well should be doing that.

Now, if only they would get rid of those annoying sites that offer "$HARDWARE? Prices, reviews, and benchmarks! Be the first to write a review!"...

Google

If
The Google rules are:
1) well understood
2) documented
3) Non-arbitrary

I'm sure google will be able to defend them in court.

However, whenever I hear people discussing them, 2) is not true, on the argument that they would be gamable otherwise.

I predict a loss for Google. Without documentation they can't prove they're not arbitrary. If they're arbitrary, they're acting like a monopoly and need to be struck down. From "do no evil" to "do the only evil that's actually explicitly forbidden by law for a company". It's quite a drop

It's an AdWords arbitrage site. It should fail.

That's an AdWords arbitrage site, one that buys cheap clicks to get traffic and sells expensive clicks to its own advertisers. Such sites are just another form of webspam. When Google raised their minimum bid for ads on search, many of those bottom-feeders dropped out, and ad clutter was reduced. Google revenue went down, too, but may recover in time.

what a crappy article

More "oh look google is becoming evil!" nonsense. How exactly is it evil or "acting like Microsoft" to refuse over a half million dollars in revenue every month in order to prevent some lame ass site from annoying real users: the people who actually use the search engine to find information? People should try to use SourceTool before they draw any conclusions. I'm sure NOBODY would visit that site unless tricked into clicking on one of their ads. Don't you think if the site actually provided any real value, they could get plenty of visits through other means such as organic search listings?

Why isn't "Expert's Exchange" in the doghouse too?

One of the greatest annoyances of Google (to those of us techies searching for answers) is "Expert's Exchange". Google gets to see the answers, but anyone searching for those answers doesn't get them, but is told to sign up and pay money for a "premium subscription".

There are ways around this, but this is all an annoyance and a pain to deal with, because the answers are readily and freely available on the Internet, and they would be much easier to find if the search results weren't clogged up with this type of garbage result.

So why aren't they in the "doghouse" too? (while we're at it, It would be great to move all the scientfic access-for-pay journals to a separate "scientific" google while we're at it -- they end up being half the results of my searches sometimes, but at least they aren't the tease that the EE site is)

Re:Search and money

But it shouldn't be up to a search engine to decide what is interesting or not.

Bullshit. Why are you the great arbiter, the Great Decider, on what a search engine should be?

Not to mention, that is exactly what search engines do--they sort through the more relevant (which are the "interesting"--links most of interest) first through algorithms for relevancy and traffic.