7 ms·

TL;DR: Google is giving users what they want instead of what I want, please change this. Seriously, what this guy wants is a search engine that promotes what h

by Kalium 12y ago

TL;DR: Google is giving users what they want instead of what I want, please change this. Seriously, what this guy wants is a search engine that promotes what he wants over what users want. He fails to understand that Google became popular specifically because it didn't do that.

sunnykgupta 12y ago
Sensible summarisation.
asuffield 12y ago
He goes a little further: he's objecting to the fact that Google is not acting as a "leveling" force to break up incumbent industries and change society. He appears to want them to act as a far-left government. I don't really feel a need to rebut this desire, beyond saying "no".
- anon1385 12y ago
  It's kind of fascinating how the supposed economic and social benefits of the open web that people spent 20 years or more evangelising are dismissed as 'far-left' once powerful incumbents have cornered the market. Suddenly advocating for the destructive forces of open competition is the same as being a radical socialist.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    The problem here isn't that there isn't open competition. The problem is that he's lost at it.
    - pessimizer 12y ago
      The problem is that it isn't competition on services or products, it's competition in gaming and/or just paying massive incumbent middlemen.
      - Kalium 12y ago
        Who provide value to the consumer that individual business sites do not. Why shouldn't they be more highly ranked?
        pessimizer 12y ago
        >Who provide value to the consumer that individual business sites do not. You're reciting this as if it's obviously true, yet offering no evidence. If a scraper beats a site, it's not a logical conclusion that the scraper was more useful to the consumer than the original site.
        Kalium 12y ago
        How many hotel sites offer price comparisons to other hotels nearby? That's value right there.
      - schucks 12y ago
        This is succinct. It appears that the Google we had 10 years ago was perhaps valid in light of our ability to capitalise on 'the most valid results' and the Google we have today hasn't innovated on their search platform to break away from 'what corporates want us to find' into 'what we want to find'. We should expect more from our worlds most used search provider. The travesty isn't even perhaps brought about by Google directly. It may in fact be a reluctance of people to question the status quo or at least be heard in doing so. If nothing else, this blog is exactly what people need to deliberate over without prejudice toward the writer, and perhaps some knowledge or value will come from that. Whatever it is, we're left with a fairly opaque 10 site list that people rarely delve beyond. And I hear the complaints already from some, sure it ever so slightly customisable, but I certainly haven't cared to do so for years.
        Kalium 12y ago
        Recall that Google's initial and ongoing innovation was moving away from what corporate entities want users to find. I think Google prioritizes what they believe users want to find and subject it to the review of user behavior. The perceived problem with this is that what they think users wants doesn't always agree with what someone else thinks users want. Like in this article, where many users clearly want to see aggregators but the author believes they don't want to see aggregators.
- sroerick 12y ago
  He's raising the observation that the easier it is to game Google, the less useful Google becomes. He's not prescribing a solution. Much less the solution of Google becoming a "far-left government." But screw equality and open access, right?
  - Kalium 12y ago
    Search engines are by their very nature un-equal. There's no way around this without removing the value in having a search engine.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Some search engines, e.g. Google 7 years ago, are less un-equal than others, e.g. Google today.
      - Kalium 12y ago
        The job of a search engine is to second-guess your desire from limited inputs and try to fulfill it. I can't think of any sane way to be "equal" about that without relying on a lot of subjective judgments. Or being bad at making decisions.
        walterbell 12y ago
        Is the strategic priority of Google leadership a subjective judgement? Are these subjective judgements objectively implemented? There are always winners and losers for any given ranking algorithm, the question is whether perception of neutrality has improved or declined in the last 7 years. What is the perception of Google's neutrality in enforcement of rules against traffic arbitrage, e.g. search toolbars: http://www.benedelman.org/news/012213-1.html http://www.benedelman.org/news/012213-1.html ?
        Kalium 12y ago
        Almost anyone who loses out will perceive things as being subjectively against them. Almost anyone who wins will perceive it as being a sign of their worthiness and objective value.
sroerick 12y ago
I don't think that's an accurate TL;DR. He's saying that Google is a plutocracy, not a democracy. I have an joke/axiom for social networks: "It's not really a social network if you can buy your way onto it." A search engine follows the same principles. If I can pay a SEO professional to have my results promoted, then information is not truly being organized.
- kaoD 12y ago
  Your logic is flawed. Random results (which can't be gamed) are more organized by your standards. I don't think so. It's the fact that results are organized what makes SEO possible.
  - sroerick 12y ago
    This is a good point. I don't think this statement is necessarily a good and logically sound axiom, and I think it applies to social networks more than search engines. I view it as a sort of a zen koan, in the vein of "It can't be all that avant garde if you're using a french word to describe it." At the same time, I think this bears more scrutiny. Intent is important here. Your assumption is that Google organizes information, and that companies are organizing their information in a similar vein in order to facilitate better indexing. If this perfect world is the case, than your argument holds. Unfortunately, I think the reality is frequently different. I think the vast majority of SEO use cases are not the organization of information, but rather the promotion of profitable information and damage control of potentially harmful informaion. You may say to this that analyzing the motives of SEO is a deeply flawed venture, and you'd probably be right. But it is the difference between a system for organizing information and a beaurocracy which only a select few have the resources to navigate.
    - kaoD 12y ago
      Actually I completely agreed with the social network idea, I just don't think it translates well to search engines. It would translate to evil-IAP games ;) SEO is just gaming the system based on how search engines organize their corpus. It's a catch-22 situation, if you organize information, then somebody else can discover patterns in how you organize it and game the system. Based on that, I'd say SEO is evidence of organization. To be fair, Google results have been very accurate for me lately (probably knows more about me than myself), specially since they use click and return rates in their ranking algorithm. Is SEO really such a game-changer for non-tech people? Or am I being victim of SEO tactics without even being aware of it? What amazes me is that you can actually "buy your way into Google" by paying ads... and it's the base of their business!
bsenftner 12y ago
Actually, what I read him saying is that none of the businesses in his industry can get a listing within their industry. His point is that intermediate "marketplaces" inject themselves into an industry and then control consumer access to that industry's products. These "marketplaces" are not actually in these industries - they are in the internet business aggregate industry, and serve the consumers very poorly, because after all the consumer is NOT their customer, their customer is their investors.
AJ007 12y ago
He's not happy that aggregators are outranking the hotel's official website. I think this is a very valid complaint. The money aggregators take is used to fund Google visibility (paid or free) rather than for the hotels to use on other things. There have been times in the past were Google's listings definitely were bad, like the whole Demand Media/content "farm" fiasco. The model of writing low quality and outright false content has largely moved from the how to articles on to news now, for better or worse. The bigger issue is mobile means less results. A few ads and one or two visible organic listings. Google has to milk the hell out of desktop users to make up for lost revenue. If we move to voice search its going to really be different. You either dominate or get nothing, no in between. Google has a model that works and makes a lot of revenue. They will not and can not innovate because those innovations will destroy the model. It is the same for any entrenched legacy corporation. Search is a good area to do innovative work in today. Update: One other note. It was always clear to me that Google's business model was to provide huge volumes of free traffic, and then remove it. If you didn't buy traffic and you relied on that free organic stuff you were asking for trouble. Many companies have ranked organically for a term. Expanded, took on long term liabilities, and then lost their rankings and failed. Most of the business owner Google complaints we hear come from those type of people. You give someone a free drip of heroin, and then take it away and ask them to pay. They will not be happy.
- Kalium 12y ago
  Often, aggregators are more useful than any given hotel's website. If I am looking to fly somewhere, I probably don't want to be taken to United's or American's homepage. I probably want Orbitz or Hipmunk or some other site that will give me the comparison tools to make my own decisions. His mistake lies in assuming that a hotel's site offers more value to users than the aggregators.
  - RichardDHH 12y ago
    You are quite correct on some points. If I book a cheap hotel for a few nights in a city even I use booking.com. If I book a weeks holiday for my family in a villa rental in far flung destination I want something else and I want to speak to the people with knowledge. Sad maybe but a lot of us like this!
pessimizer 12y ago
>Google is giving users what they want In what way? How did the size of SEO and marketing budgets somehow become the result of consumer desire rather than a manipulation of it?
- Kalium 12y ago
  His complaint seems to be that users are shown links for aggregators rather than links for individual hotels. I don't know about you, but when I google "Las Vegas hotels", I don't want to be shown Rio, Palms, Bally's, or Mandalay Bay at the top. I want an aggregator so I can compare and make my own decision. The same applies to flights - there's a reason I use Hipmunk and Orbitz instead of united.com. Aggregators can offer more value to a shopping consumer than a hotel's site does. That's why Google is giving users what they generally want - a shopping user wants the ability to make comparisons.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    >I don't know about you, but when I google "Las Vegas hotels", I don't want to be shown Rio, Palms, Bally's, or Mandalay Bay at the top. I want an aggregator so I can compare and make my own decision. I don't. I'm not sure why you assume your opinion is universal. I want a bunch of hotels and their marketing pitches, then I want to go to my favorite aggregator to price compare. All having the aggregators come up does is create an aggregation tax that every vendor has to pay - and each aggregator gives me a limited view of the market while giving the impression that it is the entire thing e.g. the lowest price on Orbitz is the lowest price amongst the people who pay Orbitz, not the lowest price, and since Orbitz takes a fee, businesses that pay Orbitz are going to be marginally higher cost than businesses who don't. Those aggregators are just more gatekeepers. I prefer aggregators that perform a function for me, and are beholden to me only.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      I think that way because it's the common shopping experience that consumer life is based around. It's familiar to most people. When you shop, do you only do business with companies that sell only their own products? Or do you buy your groceries form a store that carries multiple brands of milk?
RichardDHH 12y ago
Users, specifically in this industry, often don;t find what they want. They find what the aggregator wants them to find, that's more often that not margin generated!
- Kalium 12y ago
  Then perhaps what you actually need is a better aggregator rather than denying the value of aggregators. It's almost like what Google did that made it popular!
  - spanishlady 12y ago
    'a better aggregator' in what sense, exactly? Better for the consumer would be an aggregator which ranked properties qualitatively (first page for those with clearly genuine and excellent reviews) with those which do not get such good ratings further down the list even if they are more profitable for the aggregator.

by Kalium 12y ago

sunnykgupta 12y ago

Sensible summarisation.

asuffield 12y ago

He goes a little further: he's objecting to the fact that Google is not acting as a "leveling" force to break up incumbent industries and change society. He appears to want them to act as a far-left government. I don't really feel a need to rebut this desire, beyond saying "no".

anon1385 12y ago
It's kind of fascinating how the supposed economic and social benefits of the open web that people spent 20 years or more evangelising are dismissed as 'far-left' once powerful incumbents have cornered the market. Suddenly advocating for the destructive forces of open competition is the same as being a radical socialist.
- Kalium 12y ago
  The problem here isn't that there isn't open competition. The problem is that he's lost at it.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    The problem is that it isn't competition on services or products, it's competition in gaming and/or just paying massive incumbent middlemen.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      Who provide value to the consumer that individual business sites do not. Why shouldn't they be more highly ranked?
      - pessimizer 12y ago
        >Who provide value to the consumer that individual business sites do not. You're reciting this as if it's obviously true, yet offering no evidence. If a scraper beats a site, it's not a logical conclusion that the scraper was more useful to the consumer than the original site.
        Kalium 12y ago
        How many hotel sites offer price comparisons to other hotels nearby? That's value right there.
    - schucks 12y ago
      This is succinct. It appears that the Google we had 10 years ago was perhaps valid in light of our ability to capitalise on 'the most valid results' and the Google we have today hasn't innovated on their search platform to break away from 'what corporates want us to find' into 'what we want to find'. We should expect more from our worlds most used search provider. The travesty isn't even perhaps brought about by Google directly. It may in fact be a reluctance of people to question the status quo or at least be heard in doing so. If nothing else, this blog is exactly what people need to deliberate over without prejudice toward the writer, and perhaps some knowledge or value will come from that. Whatever it is, we're left with a fairly opaque 10 site list that people rarely delve beyond. And I hear the complaints already from some, sure it ever so slightly customisable, but I certainly haven't cared to do so for years.
      - Kalium 12y ago
        Recall that Google's initial and ongoing innovation was moving away from what corporate entities want users to find. I think Google prioritizes what they believe users want to find and subject it to the review of user behavior. The perceived problem with this is that what they think users wants doesn't always agree with what someone else thinks users want. Like in this article, where many users clearly want to see aggregators but the author believes they don't want to see aggregators.
sroerick 12y ago
He's raising the observation that the easier it is to game Google, the less useful Google becomes. He's not prescribing a solution. Much less the solution of Google becoming a "far-left government." But screw equality and open access, right?
- Kalium 12y ago
  Search engines are by their very nature un-equal. There's no way around this without removing the value in having a search engine.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Some search engines, e.g. Google 7 years ago, are less un-equal than others, e.g. Google today.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      The job of a search engine is to second-guess your desire from limited inputs and try to fulfill it. I can't think of any sane way to be "equal" about that without relying on a lot of subjective judgments. Or being bad at making decisions.
      - walterbell 12y ago
        Is the strategic priority of Google leadership a subjective judgement? Are these subjective judgements objectively implemented? There are always winners and losers for any given ranking algorithm, the question is whether perception of neutrality has improved or declined in the last 7 years. What is the perception of Google's neutrality in enforcement of rules against traffic arbitrage, e.g. search toolbars: http://www.benedelman.org/news/012213-1.html http://www.benedelman.org/news/012213-1.html ?
        Kalium 12y ago
        Almost anyone who loses out will perceive things as being subjectively against them. Almost anyone who wins will perceive it as being a sign of their worthiness and objective value.

sroerick 12y ago

I don't think that's an accurate TL;DR. He's saying that Google is a plutocracy, not a democracy. I have an joke/axiom for social networks: "It's not really a social network if you can buy your way onto it." A search engine follows the same principles. If I can pay a SEO professional to have my results promoted, then information is not truly being organized.

kaoD 12y ago
Your logic is flawed. Random results (which can't be gamed) are more organized by your standards. I don't think so. It's the fact that results are organized what makes SEO possible.
- sroerick 12y ago
  This is a good point. I don't think this statement is necessarily a good and logically sound axiom, and I think it applies to social networks more than search engines. I view it as a sort of a zen koan, in the vein of "It can't be all that avant garde if you're using a french word to describe it." At the same time, I think this bears more scrutiny. Intent is important here. Your assumption is that Google organizes information, and that companies are organizing their information in a similar vein in order to facilitate better indexing. If this perfect world is the case, than your argument holds. Unfortunately, I think the reality is frequently different. I think the vast majority of SEO use cases are not the organization of information, but rather the promotion of profitable information and damage control of potentially harmful informaion. You may say to this that analyzing the motives of SEO is a deeply flawed venture, and you'd probably be right. But it is the difference between a system for organizing information and a beaurocracy which only a select few have the resources to navigate.
  - kaoD 12y ago
    Actually I completely agreed with the social network idea, I just don't think it translates well to search engines. It would translate to evil-IAP games ;) SEO is just gaming the system based on how search engines organize their corpus. It's a catch-22 situation, if you organize information, then somebody else can discover patterns in how you organize it and game the system. Based on that, I'd say SEO is evidence of organization. To be fair, Google results have been very accurate for me lately (probably knows more about me than myself), specially since they use click and return rates in their ranking algorithm. Is SEO really such a game-changer for non-tech people? Or am I being victim of SEO tactics without even being aware of it? What amazes me is that you can actually "buy your way into Google" by paying ads... and it's the base of their business!

bsenftner 12y ago

Actually, what I read him saying is that none of the businesses in his industry can get a listing within their industry. His point is that intermediate "marketplaces" inject themselves into an industry and then control consumer access to that industry's products. These "marketplaces" are not actually in these industries - they are in the internet business aggregate industry, and serve the consumers very poorly, because after all the consumer is NOT their customer, their customer is their investors.

AJ007 12y ago

He's not happy that aggregators are outranking the hotel's official website. I think this is a very valid complaint. The money aggregators take is used to fund Google visibility (paid or free) rather than for the hotels to use on other things. There have been times in the past were Google's listings definitely were bad, like the whole Demand Media/content "farm" fiasco. The model of writing low quality and outright false content has largely moved from the how to articles on to news now, for better or worse. The bigger issue is mobile means less results. A few ads and one or two visible organic listings. Google has to milk the hell out of desktop users to make up for lost revenue. If we move to voice search its going to really be different. You either dominate or get nothing, no in between. Google has a model that works and makes a lot of revenue. They will not and can not innovate because those innovations will destroy the model. It is the same for any entrenched legacy corporation. Search is a good area to do innovative work in today. Update: One other note. It was always clear to me that Google's business model was to provide huge volumes of free traffic, and then remove it. If you didn't buy traffic and you relied on that free organic stuff you were asking for trouble. Many companies have ranked organically for a term. Expanded, took on long term liabilities, and then lost their rankings and failed. Most of the business owner Google complaints we hear come from those type of people. You give someone a free drip of heroin, and then take it away and ask them to pay. They will not be happy.

Kalium 12y ago
Often, aggregators are more useful than any given hotel's website. If I am looking to fly somewhere, I probably don't want to be taken to United's or American's homepage. I probably want Orbitz or Hipmunk or some other site that will give me the comparison tools to make my own decisions. His mistake lies in assuming that a hotel's site offers more value to users than the aggregators.
- RichardDHH 12y ago
  You are quite correct on some points. If I book a cheap hotel for a few nights in a city even I use booking.com. If I book a weeks holiday for my family in a villa rental in far flung destination I want something else and I want to speak to the people with knowledge. Sad maybe but a lot of us like this!

pessimizer 12y ago

>Google is giving users what they want In what way? How did the size of SEO and marketing budgets somehow become the result of consumer desire rather than a manipulation of it?

Kalium 12y ago
His complaint seems to be that users are shown links for aggregators rather than links for individual hotels. I don't know about you, but when I google "Las Vegas hotels", I don't want to be shown Rio, Palms, Bally's, or Mandalay Bay at the top. I want an aggregator so I can compare and make my own decision. The same applies to flights - there's a reason I use Hipmunk and Orbitz instead of united.com. Aggregators can offer more value to a shopping consumer than a hotel's site does. That's why Google is giving users what they generally want - a shopping user wants the ability to make comparisons.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >I don't know about you, but when I google "Las Vegas hotels", I don't want to be shown Rio, Palms, Bally's, or Mandalay Bay at the top. I want an aggregator so I can compare and make my own decision. I don't. I'm not sure why you assume your opinion is universal. I want a bunch of hotels and their marketing pitches, then I want to go to my favorite aggregator to price compare. All having the aggregators come up does is create an aggregation tax that every vendor has to pay - and each aggregator gives me a limited view of the market while giving the impression that it is the entire thing e.g. the lowest price on Orbitz is the lowest price amongst the people who pay Orbitz, not the lowest price, and since Orbitz takes a fee, businesses that pay Orbitz are going to be marginally higher cost than businesses who don't. Those aggregators are just more gatekeepers. I prefer aggregators that perform a function for me, and are beholden to me only.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    I think that way because it's the common shopping experience that consumer life is based around. It's familiar to most people. When you shop, do you only do business with companies that sell only their own products? Or do you buy your groceries form a store that carries multiple brands of milk?

RichardDHH 12y ago

Users, specifically in this industry, often don;t find what they want. They find what the aggregator wants them to find, that's more often that not margin generated!

Kalium 12y ago
Then perhaps what you actually need is a better aggregator rather than denying the value of aggregators. It's almost like what Google did that made it popular!
- spanishlady 12y ago
  'a better aggregator' in what sense, exactly? Better for the consumer would be an aggregator which ranked properties qualitatively (first page for those with clearly genuine and excellent reviews) with those which do not get such good ratings further down the list even if they are more profitable for the aggregator.