{"id":27290,"date":"2019-11-18T16:06:13","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T21:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=27290"},"modified":"2019-11-18T16:07:09","modified_gmt":"2019-11-18T21:07:09","slug":"how-google-interferes-with-its-search-algorithms-and-changes-your-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/18\/how-google-interferes-with-its-search-algorithms-and-changes-your-results\/","title":{"rendered":"How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kirsten Grind et al.<\/a> (via Sam Schechner<\/a>, Hacker<\/a> News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Over time, Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’ rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

In one change hotly contested within Google, engineers opted to tilt results to favor prominent businesses over smaller ones, based on the argument that customers were more likely to get what they wanted at larger outlets. One effect of the change was a boost to Amazon’s products, even if the items had been discontinued, according to people familiar with the matter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Barry Schwartz<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The truth is, I spoke to a number of these Wall Street Journal reporters back in both March and April about this topic, and it was clear then that they had little knowledge about how search worked. Even a basic understanding of the difference between organic listings (the free search results) and the paid listings (the ads in the search results) eluded them. They seemed to have one goal: to come up with a sensational story about how Google is abusing its power and responsibility for self gain.<\/p>\n

Google is not certainly perfect, but almost everything in the Wall Street Journal report is incorrect.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I know they interviewed me a couple of times, and I told you how that went above. But we reached out to Glenn Gabe, an SEO industry veteran who works extensively with companies that have been impacted by search algorithm updates, who was quoted in the piece. Gabe told us that not only were his conversations with the paper off-the-record but also that he was misquoted. Gabe said he reached out to the reporter who apologized and offered to fix the quote. But later he was told that the quote had to stay as is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

It’s worrisome that something so important is a black box. I’ve been seeing smoke<\/a> about stuff like this for years, but solid information is hard to come by, and no one has yet put it together in a way that shows there really is a fire. It seems that this report doesn’t, either.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n