Can Bullies Manipulate Google?

These are interesting times we live it. Technology continues to change everything. But there are always people who figure out ways to game the system and harm others. Consider this article from the New York Times:
"A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html

I don't know enough to comment on the technical facts of the article (whether Google can truly be gamed like this, whether they are working on a fix, et cetera).

But I'm just as fascinated by the human aspects of the story. On the one hand you want to knock this guy out for being such an asshole. But there is a (very small) part of me that admires his ability to make accurate observations and design a business model to take advantage of what he sees. He simply does what works, even if it is despicable.


At this point it is probably best to turn the commentary over to Search Engine Land. If you liked the original story and want to hear more details, you'll like this, too. Danny Sullivan was quoted in the original story and continues with more analysis here:
"Google’s 'Gold Standard' Search Results Take Big Hit In New York Times Story" by Danny Sullivan
http://searchengineland.com/googles-gold-standard-results-take-hit-new-york-times-57081

Interestingly, Bing has the same problem. But as Sullivan points out, "Google’s the market leader and over the past year or so has aggressively pushed that it has great search quality in a variety of ways, such as public relations and blog posts. That doesn’t excuse Bing from needing to do the same improvements. But similarly, the 'Bing has the same problem, too' response won’t wash with me." Nor should it.

Also interesting in both stories is the response (or lack thereof) from the credit card companies. Not very impressive.


It will be interesting to see how Google, Bing, eBay, Amazon, credit card companies, and others respond to this tactic. It certainly appears that there is a lot of room to improve here.


Update, December 1, 2010
From The Official Google Blog:
"Being bad to your customers is bad for business"
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html

"Instead, in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

"We can't say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future. We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google’s ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That’s why we cannot reveal the details of our solution—the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings—beyond what we’ve already said. We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google. And we will continue to work hard towards a better search."