More evidence of the Google Slippery Search Slope

It's interesting - ever since we wrote about the "Increasing Uselessness of Google Search" after the 2010 Christmas holidays, it looks like a whole lot of Googleflaws are coming out. Today there is a report in the NYT of how JC Penney gamed them over several months in the holiday period. Essentially JC got some black-hat SEO guys to build a link-farm to boost their rankings across a whole lot of consumer product terms, and Google didn't spot it.

There are links to JC Penney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on. Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie ever: “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.” When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.

The thing is, these things are not new - anybody in the whole 'Net space knew about all this 5 years ago at least, those in Search knew about it for even longer. So the question you have to ask yourself is "how come it takes such a bright company like Google so long to not solve this problem?" . The Google Hypothesis is that this is all very hard, and there is a continual war with SEO guys, and the War On Spam is a long term slog, and besides their metrics tell them there is less spam and better results than ever.

I think they are being somewhat disingenuous, or (more scarily) their metrics are plain wrong as they don't understand what "spam" really is. It's not that all of Google is corrupted, but our experience is that typically anything of mass market consumer value is gamed to the nines - and it's not as if one has to put any deep study in, its visible to the naked eye, as it were. It is blatantly obvious what is being gamed, and how it is being gamed, and has been for several years, and I for one cannot believe that it is not possible to develop approached to solve this for the 5% of the Googleverse that is taking 95% of this spam if one had the will (I believe they have the know-how). Non trivial, sure - but do-able, even if it requires human intelligence - especially over 5 years.

So we have to look for the "why" there was not been the will - one option is that they have been so busy with all the other projects that the eye has been taken off the ball. Possible, and I suspect that's what they will tell us in about 3 months or so when more comes out the Googlewoodwork (There will be more, I am sure....). Another hypothesis is that Google, by a combination of intellectual comfort (no Search challengers till recently) and reliance on Big Algorithms, wasn't able to see/ build effective defences. But heck, competitors and decent New Search techniques have been around for the last 2 years now.

But here’s another hypothesis, that also explains all the facts and complexities, the almost unchallenged arrival of mass Content Farm businesses, and win's the Patrick's Razor award - we will let the NYT run with it:

Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

The hypothesis that Google is colluding in all this as eventually a lot of the Ad money flows to them is clearly a heinous suggestion - but it does explain things rather well......


*Patrick's Razor - when it comes to money, the most cynical explanation is usually right