The more and more I see Google gobble up new areas and jump into new verticals, the more I personally envision their own search results filled with just about only their own products. For someone who works on improving client search results for SEO, this will become an ever-increasing frustration as Google’s SERPs will be less and less beneficial for clients looking for direct impacts to their site. How so? Here’s a vision of how the search results could be in a few years (click to enlarge):

Of course, that entirely depends on whether Google is still around. Nonetheless, as frustrating as it can be to see these results, it makes me wonder how much Google is just shooting itself in the foot the more it continues to promote its own products over other results (manually or algorithimically). All one would need is a great advertising campaign to publically make fun of Google for having all its search results as Google.

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With the full text of Google’s general guidelines leaked on remote quality raters (April 2007 version — PDF) , one can really envision the immense problems that Google is having with its algorithm. A company that proclaimed itself as being able to algorithmically determine what should rank well across the web has been slowly backtracking towards either a manual approach or a double-checking approach towards Google’s search results.

News of the document is spreading like wildfire with ideas on how to use it to every SEO advantage. You can even begin to see further manual reviews happening as well affecting a multitude of websites.

Nonetheless, what the main players are not noting is how blatantly this points out the failure of Google’s algorithm and the future of spam results showing up more prominently.

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I ran across a hot topic on Sphinn titled “Google Showing Bias Towards .org TLDs” and thought to take a look at how other sites/people are trying to run tests on what matters to Google. I am always appreciative to see people trying to run tests that go beyond just pure guesses as I’ve stated before about statistical SEO. Below are some of the findings from The Google Cache on what TLDs matter:

Preliminary Results:

The results were quite shocking. The .org subdomains outranked all other extensions. As you can see, the .nets and .coms are intermixed, some not ranking at all, but the .orgs are stacked at the top. While these results must be taken with a grain of salt until they can be verified on a much larger scale, it does indicate that there may be some bias towards the .org top level domain. (many have suspected this) These results have shown true on appx 80% of datacenters we have tested.

[...]

Implications:

1. Further study is definitely needed. Virante will be expanding the number of test subjects greatly and testing with and without subdomains.
2. Considering the costs are quite similar, it may make sense to begin using .orgs, like our good friends at SEOMoz

I’ve gone through my share of econometric papers, so I usually quickly turn my eyes to what the set-ups were to test such an experiment. First, let’s look at the methodology:

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Everything I learned about Google and the Internet, oh wait, Google is wanting to be the Internet…:

Breaking Down Their “Tools”, and Their Purpose

1. E-Commerce
   1. Google Checkout - There is no business that makes money like the money business. Stepping into Paypal’s shoes, this service is not massive…yet. I have an odd feeling the plans for this are future-based
   2. Froogle - An invasion upon the various comparison shopping websites(remember when MySimon was huge?).
   3. Google Base - Call it CraigsList2.0. It even has personal ads.
   4. Music Search - Try Searching for “The Decemberists Album”. You’ll see yet another top bar ahead of the search results. This is their way of driving traffic to Google Base. But it once again shows that they’re gaining some decent AI about product searches. Not only searching information, but understanding it.
   5. Google Pages - Google’s free hosting setup. Why is this under e-commerce? Read the next section and you’ll understand…
2. Information Centralization
   1. Google Reader - A central location to access all websites you would not normally have to search for. Takes the place of (well, other RSS readers), but also type in traffic and bookmarks.
   2. Local Search - Invalidates the need for a small business website(in the eyes of many). At the top of any search result, it shows business addresses, phone numbers, and busienss names.
   3. Knols - Brings the information of Wikipedia into the “Google” fold. With the information they have organized and indexed, it’s easy to bring it together. Ties in lovely with the define: Function
   4. Question and Answer - Everyone, open a new tab, and search for “What is the population of China?”, or “What time is it in Dayton, Ohio?”. Surprised? Yeahhhh. By having users go straight to them for this information, once again, increased marketshare, no webmaster participation involved.
   5. Define:keyword Search - Perhaps the first sign that Google was doing more than just indexing information. They were organizing it, extracting meaning from it. It’s the first step necessary to being able re-create information.
   6. GMail - You’ll notice this little gem(and it is a gem by the way) got introduced when a significant portion of the middle-aged adults were getting more acquainted with the internet. This particular group has a tendency towards e-mail; it’s safe and requires no credit card number. Not only did it cut into Hotmails market share, but in doing so the people not overly familar with the internet became familiar with Google, and became potential crossovers from the default Live.com search.
   7. Google Print - Google’s project aiming to scan as many books as possible into their database. Using OCR, they’re text-searchable. Click one, and surprise surprise, we see a familiar bar at the left allowing us to purchase this book from a variety of sources…once again, read the next section to realize the implications here.

Scary implications really and I couldn’t say it any better on what Google wants to do and change the Internet unto its own image.

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Here’s my comment via the article at UK Times Online on Slashdot:

 You can follow three paths as a search engine (in simplistic terms):

1) Show everything–this implies crap sites (*coughs* boingboing), great sites (*coughs*

/.), malware sites (3221.com), search results sites, etc. thereupon your results are fully awful, but absolutely representative of what a search engine is “supposed” to show by previous comments, and thus get banned in China thereby showing nothing.

2) Do as you are told–obviously not as fun and cries of shenanigans and submissions are there, but then you get to show more results to people around the world who otherwise would just be filled with pure propaganda.

3) Do your own thing–”hitting the corner of the ping-pong table”, barely get by with regulations without getting punished.

Guess what? None of those are illegal to do under any international law at this point in time (although I recall some events within the US on trying to sue sites that just link to other pages, but nothing for the international arena) and certainly nothing illegal to show or not show within the US for political sites.

Remember, this is a corporation, not a government, so there is no “right” that you have for them to “display” your site in “their” index.

At least all algorithmically anyway.

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Google announced a few days ago its vision to essentially mash together a Wikipedia like site with a Squidoo layout essentially desiring to have a competitive online encyclopedia that has ads. Beyond the horrible name, this product may come to haunt Google in the long-run becoming a turning point its perceived status as an honest company into a monopolistic corporation similarly to Microsoft.

Google Knol essentially could take down the major content providers such as Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages, Yahoo Answers, etc. as it will naturally be ‘algorithmically’ favored by the grand ‘artificial intelligence’ of Google—just as Youtube currently is for videos. Competition for ad revenue will drive a lot of people to copy millions of text from across the web creating duplicate content issues that Google still cannot detect through its ‘artificial intelligence’ particularly with RSS feeds, in turn creating complaints of infringements on copywriting.

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A fascinating exchange between Mr. Google (Matt Cutts) and Johnon (John Andrews) about Google Search Results and how essentially the results are becoming increasingly irrelevant to online users, but with that said, Google’s Search Results are still far and above better than anything out there at this point in time. Of the conversation about Google vs. Innovation, I just wanted to point out one prescient point in the comments by ‘Dan’:

 Google search has become nothing more than… one big AD aggregator…which to me… has nothing at all to do with Internet search.

Google’s Search Results may not be that yet, but I can guarantee it probably will be in due time as more people learn about online marketing and the competition level rises.

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