Comments on: I won’t lose sleep over Google and adverts

By: A Knee To The Googlies | The Gospel According To Rhys

A Knee To The Googlies | The Gospel According To Rhys — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:56:48 +0000

[...] Doctorvee posted, I rely very little on search engines (it’s about 5% of my daily traffic), prefer relying on [...]

By: Rhys

Rhys — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:56:01 +0000

I’ve dropped to a PR3 blog. Which ironically is the page rank of Youtube now

I don’t really follow too much of Google, but I believe they think that bloggers have too much power in themselves, so are trying to cripple them financially.

Doesn’t bother me, I’m still okay, but I know a bunch of people who still rely on page rank.

Think with this, and supporting a browser that blocks it’s main source of revenue in 2-3 clicks, google are trying hard to shoot themselves in the foot.

Would be interesting to see what’d happen if every single link on the internet became nofollow

By: 1st Lady.

1st Lady. — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 13:49:54 +0000

Just checked my PR which had been a 4 up until this week. Surprised to find it’s dropped to a 2 within the last few days. i have no paid text links or similar. I wonder if they are ranking blogs differently now?

By: Toxic

Toxic — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:30:16 +0000

CC is right, far too much power now and we all know what power tends to do.

By: Colin Campbell

Colin Campbell — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 09:19:48 +0000

Right on the money Duncan. The only thing I wonder about is the incredible power that Google has to play God.

By: Calum Leslie

Calum Leslie — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:40:20 +0000

Also, on the latter part of the comment, Google is incredibly handy if you actually need reference on something (rather than just a high-level overview as you’d get on Wikipedia). Specific problems (particularly in my domain, being a computer guy) are made infinitely easier to find and solve.

And let’s follow this up with a quote which puts across the sort of change in emphasis on search that you describe, from Google’s Amit Singhal:

Search over the last few years has moved from ‘Give me what I typed’ to ‘Give me what I want’

By: Calum Leslie

Calum Leslie — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:32:28 +0000

My educated-but-without-required-knowledge guess about this would be that, rather than being anti-competitive, Google is trying to right its own algorithm. The Google algorithm (basically) treats links from one site to another as a recommendation, and being able to grab “recommendations” from top sites just by buying ads could artificially inflate an advertiser’s SiteRank, since Google can’t distinguish between legitimate links and ads.

This could also, of course, be fixed with rel=”nofollow”, but it seems unlikely advertisers would be happy about this.

Just a guess. Ranking down Text Link Ads’ main page seems not to follow this model, though.