Google Secrecy

[salubritas]

What do people think about the air of secrecy around Google's technology?

On the one hand, it's a private company that has no obligation to publicise what it sees as trade secrets. Also, publicising algorithms may help SEO "cheaters" to climb the rankings.

On the other hand, Google is now immensely powerful, unregulated and has a profound effect on peoples' livelihoods. The spirit of openness has not hurt software such as Linux (though I am not suggesting Google should go open source), and it is this spirit which founded the world wide web.

Are Google's algorithms so weak that their site would fall apart if they let people know more? Should they not give something back by opening up a little to the searchers who trust them so implicitly?

[minstrel]

Are Google's algorithms so weak that their site would fall apart if they let people know more? Should they not give something back by opening up a little to the searchers who trust them so implicitly?

A certain degree of "secrecy" is necessary both to protect the integrity of their search engine from website owners who have a huge incentive to try to find a way to exploit what they know about Google to gain an unfair advantage over their more honest and ethical competitors. It's probably also necessary to keep certain things secret from Google's own competitors - if you had a competitive advantage in any market, would you really reveal all your secrets, knowing that this would eventually cause you to lose that advantage?

Think of it another way: no matter what niche of the internet you're competing in, if all of Google's secrets were known, how long do you think it would take the purveyors of porn to find a way to exploit that information so that someone typing in "website design" would be directed to one of their sleazy sites?

[Steven Glover]

If there were knowledge to be had I certainly would use the information provided at any opportunity. I wouldn't break Google policy, but I would do my best to work around it. Having Googles Algorhythms would help you.

[mm99]

That's a good point and one I'm sure many have asked at one time or another. A person from google, in an article in a trade pub, mentioned 2 things of import to goog. First, make the site so the engines can find what it needs to list you in a relevent way, and second, have presence elsewhere, (dir, ses, links from other sites) indicating that someone else thinks something of your site.

I had noticed these things were important, just in my exp with goog...Write good clean code that leads to your content (and HAVE content) and submit to every dir I could get my hands on. When I read this, I was not surprised at all. There are "tricks" and such that I (and everyone else) use, but if you have those 2 things going for you, you should not have much of a problem.

It has been my exp that goog does what it feels ness to give searchers the best info it can provide. It has always made changes to prevent abuse (remember hidden text, link farms, redirects, doorway pages) and it is doing it again.

When it became clear to us that having people link to us would give us better rank, we all went out and exchanged links. I feel, and have felt for some time, that goog would probably make some changes regarding the matter. If your site was very heavily reliant on this, and not enough on other things, you are probably taking a hit right now.

On the other hand, if you wrote good clean code they can read, have content to read, and are listed with other ses and dirs, you probably didn't do to bad.

I have many sites in the area of gaming and most are well linked but none over linked. The ones I am having any diff with at all are some redirects because I moved it's content to a new host. The redirects lost something and the root listings remained the same. My slant on this is that once the content is found, I'll be ok. I've taken very little by way of a bad hit from goog.

It would seem that goog is playing fair and always has. They tell you what they are looking for without going into detail (read secrets). I think that many sites that are suffering were "over linked", that is to say, that goog may have detected more links than looked natural, rather than a nice balance of content it can find and presence elsewhere in dirs, ses and the like.

Those of you that took a hit...did you make it a point to gather as many links as you could (maybe "over linked"), without much thought to content that can be found, and dir listings?

I think that they may be weeding out bad sites that ranked well because of lots of links. It will all work out once the dust settles a bit.

peace...Paul

[salubritas]

It's probably also necessary to keep certain things secret from Google's own competitors - if you had a competitive advantage in any market, would you really reveal all your secrets, knowing that this would eventually cause you to lose that advantage?

My own opinion is that of course Google should not reveal all its secrets, but it should let us (as web users, not developers) know some more about how it decides what websites it thinks are relevant to us.

Most of my friends and family are not in the IT industry and they do not understand that search engine results may be skewed and manipulated (by both search engines and webmasters) and not neccessarily relevant to them. To them Google is a directory and authority of everything on the web - if a site does not appear in the first few pages of results then it does not exist as far as they are concerned. By second-guessing users when they search for certain terms, Google is saying "I know what you want better than you do", but nowhere is there a link to something like "why we think these sites are relevant". Yes, you get a "Dissatisfied with your search results?" link but that is the only hint that the results might be less than perfect. On Google's user help area - http://www.google.com/help/index.html - there is no clue that Google is anything less than a complete and infallible index.

I think Google should make it clearer to users that they do not report on the web verbatim but they have certain (currently secret) techniques that are intended to bias the results to be relevant - which sometimes fail and should be circumvented by the user to get better results.

[jkwilson78]

Google offers this info on their site:

http://www.google.com/technology/whyuse.html
http://www.google.com/help/interpret.html

Beyond this information what more could the "average" surfer need? A more prominent link to this information would help but any more technical and they won't understand. Begin to offer more specifics and it just becomes a play ground for people gaming the system. We all saw what happened with PageRank when they admitted it played an important role in their algorithm. Telling us what works or even "meaty" clues just causes more spam to clog the results and that is what the average user doesn't need and most definitely what Google doesn't want.

The search results are free! Any money you make from a free lising is a gift. How many business can run for free? Sure there is time involved but if you rely solely on Google searh results you are advertising your business for free. This will never work as a long term strategy. It scares me to death and motivates me to diversify my marketing.

Google for now is most definitely king but it won't always be that way. Their market share will decrease when Yahoo cuts them off and what happens if Microsoft can rangle AOL away from Google? Their dominance is quickly wittled away. Unfortunately, I think the future of search is going to be about paying to even get consideration for a listing.
Let alone the time it takes to properly optimize and stay on top of things.