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Google is not presenting their own competing services in a biased way over others. They are presenting search results in context sensitive ways. Searching for s
by falien 16y ago
Google is not presenting their own competing services in a biased way over others. They are presenting search results in context sensitive ways. Searching for sushi in a geographic location indicates you want to find sushi places in that area. A google map is the best possible way for google to present the information you want. Does a crowdsourced site completely dedicated to this tiny niche do a better job than google's algorithm? of course it does, but there is no way for google's algorithm to judge that for every query.
Search instead for "sushi review stockholm" and the cited website is the first result and there is no google map at the top, because the search does not indicate to google that the first priority is to simply find sushi places and nothing else.
Now if google was artificially placing gmail, or google docs, or any of their other service products that are not themselves presenting search results, above the competition for generic search terms; that would be a problem. The behaviour cited in the post is simply the best way for google to provide search results. Google maps is a core search technology, just like google image search, books, video etc. You can't use anti-monopoly rules to handicap the dominant product itself. Especially when all the competition (search providers) considers the same behaviour to be part of their core search service as well.
- falien 16y agoNote that to see this behaviour on other search engines, you may need to use US locations. Yahoo and Bing don't seem to recognize stockholm as a location.
- shrikant 16y agoThat's a bug, not a feature.
- kulkarnic 16y agoI'm sorry I don't buy this argument: When someone searches for "sushi stockholm" on Google, they aren't saying "Show me a map with all the sushi places in Stockholm". They are saying "I want to know more about getting sushi in Stockholm. Can you show me a webpage that can show me that?" That webpage could well be the Google Maps website; and to level the playing field, Google could use a similar blue-link to the Google Maps page that highlights sushi places (or alternatively, show a map from the author's website). I wouldn't, however, hold my breath. On the Internet, it's NEVER going to be completely fair. If they could, simple, personal geocities-based recipe sites would prevent AllRecipes and BBC from taking over "their" expertise (some of those old homepages had seriously awesome recipes!)
- moultano 16y ago>they aren't saying "Show me a map with all the sushi places in Stockholm". They are saying "I want to know more about getting sushi in Stockholm. Can you show me a webpage that can show me that?" [Citation needed] Presumably if you're correct, and users aren't actually looking for the google maps interface, they'll skip it and move to the web results. Users have now come to expect this behavior from Google when they type in local search queries.
- falien 16y agoThey aren't saying either of those things. They are saying "show me sushi stockholm" which google interprets as "show me sushi in stockholm" and as far as google knows (and accurately as far as I'm concerned when I use google), any sort of searches explicitly limited to a known geographic area are best answered by a map of that area with search results shown on top of it. If you search for "getting sushi in stockholm" you don't get a map. The language that triggers a map as the first result is very specific and not limited to google. Individuals may find that they don't like the map as the first result for some queries, but as a company every major search engine as decided this is the best way to present certain results. Rail against it as a website owner or user all you want, but it is absolutely a legitimate practice. Of course it is possible to have better results for certain queries. Is it even remotely plausible for google to reliably decide that? To my knowledge, not without solving some very difficult problems, which they may or may not have any motivation to do, but they are certainly under no obligation to do it either.
- leej 16y agoif google is a search provider mapquest or other map engine results should have been there like it does web content from yahoo or microsoft.