Google has answered The Wall Street Journal guest editorial written by Nextag CEO Jeffrey Katz in which he said in part:
“Google has ballooned into a monopoly, pegging its closest competition — at least in the search space — as one that has no hope of competing. ”
“Google has become a brand killer. If Google pushes a merchant or company to page three of its search results, let alone page 40, it is life-altering.”
“This “cloak of invisibility” for less-favored brands flies in the face of Google’s original mission to “organize the world’s information” — or at least organize it in a manner that is in the best interest of consumers, rather than of Google.”
Amit Singhal, senior vice president of engineering at Google, responded to the Guest Editorial on the Google Public Policy Blog Friday,
“Unpaid, natural search results are never influenced by payment”.
“Our algorithms rank results based only on what the most relevant answers are for users — which might be a direct answer or a competitor’s Web site.”
“Our ads and commercial experiences are clearly labeled and distinct from the unpaid results, and we recently announced new improvements to labeling of shopping results.”
“This is in contrast to most comparison shopping sites, which receive payment from merchants but often don’t clearly label search results as being influenced by payment.”
Who’s Google kidding?
Do they really think they can fool retailers who are watching like a hawk what Google does?
Jeffrey Katz is dead-on right.
Korian –
Agreed.
The reply to the WSJ article is weak and some of it borders on lies. If you want to provide paid results that fine, as long as they are CLEARLY marked, which they are not.
They are also competing in far too many verticals and their idea of impartial search is two google finance sites ranking above the finacial times for the term finance. Yeah right, F*** you.
… all the more reason why the smartest companies own the generic names of their products and services in .com … and forward such to their primary sites.
Invest in the domain once and it’s yours forever … for the pittance of renewal fees.
Just try to get those benefits with paid advertising (including SEO) … where you pay, pay, and pay; over and over again … forever.
If Katz is reading put Wall Street Journal in the search bar rather than address bar
The first result you get is WSJ.com a large paid display ad by your publication
How many clicks a month are you getting and how much is this costing
And why do you need to advertise when you are the first organic result?
I don’t think anyone really needs to search for the web address of the Wall Street Journal
Now think about your own advertisers and how much of their budget for you has been redirected to Google for something just as dumb
And you are the leader in business news?
Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts are professional liars, do not believe a word they say. Google algorithms are designed to maximize Google’s Adwords profit and support larger goals, such as ruining competitor through changes like Panda and Penguin.
In 2011, the year Panda was introduced, Google’s profits skyrocketed and clicks on ads went up by 40%. Support e real search engine, Google is no longer one.
Jeffrey Katz is correct.
@SteveM, Couldn’t agree with you more.
Googles organic results “are” influenced by money. The content of the organic results drives inorganic sales, which is ok, so long as the content of the organic results are not engineered in any way other than “keyword relevance” and user experience. Seems odd to me that the websites of big brands and Wikipedia, and most notably amazon, dell, and eBay are typically the most relevant organic result when there are billions of other sites indexed for the same keyword. Are wiki, eBay and amazon really that relevant to everything? And that’s just to name 3. It only takes 10 to knock everyone who isn’t in te relevant elite off to the second page of results, and only 5 to be below the fold.
And this isn’t taking into account the fact that te organic results are pushed to or below the fold already by google maps and other google products, that are paid.
50 years ago Google would have been the subject of an anti-trust lawsuit.
Things have changed.
“The World Has Gone Generic”
it’s already known from years that the Google SE algorythm can be “programmed” to show (or ban) the sites that Google wants in the early pages of results
Gargoogle needs to be dis-assembled. As mentioned they have their hands in way too many pots and naturally will promote their products across platforms leaving everyone else in the digital dust.
I have been trying a new search engine that doesn’t track your searches –
http://donttrack.us/
or “bubble” you. – http://dontbubble.us/
It’s called = http://DuckDuckGo.com/
– I think they could use a better name, but nice change.
the best part of this is that Google users are clueless about all of this and will remain in oblivion…
It’s their traffic and they can do whatever they please with it.
(as long as is not illegal of course )
Their open door policy for users/advertisers/publishers remains in place last time I checked..
Disingenuous. Google will soon be introducing paid placement for Google shopping. Google is morphing into what all previous search engines became, Goto.com, AltaVista, etc.
Pretending to be committed to natural search while pursuing commercial search is a cheap way to attract more users.
Why can’t they just be honest? Provide a separate non-commercial search engine along with a commercial one. People will use both, only at different times. That’s fair. Sometimes users are looking for things to purchase, sometime they are not.
Google will just do whatever they have to in order to keep making their numbers. And that will be the death of so-called ‘natural search” using Google.
We agree. Had to accept deals on sites that Google destroyed (IMO). Seems like they have no problem allowing people to copy and paste your information to another website. As a result, they rank the person with Adwords number #1 and deindex keyword sites with content.
We agree, it is life altering. Your domain dies afterward, revenue is affected and the deranking kills your portfolio value. We have data to support this. Moreover, it take light years to be reconsidered into their search engine on their mistake. Sad practice but reality.
We say this is in my opinion, but facts can support this notion.
when I read that reply , I thought my oh my………….this guy is so carefully selecting his text word by word and it still smells of bullshit!
The truth is hard to hide, but it’s still the truth! Only thing that counts is relevance…ya right!