Search Engines and the Entitlement Mentality
Fri, Mar 24 2006
In the last eBusiness News I talked about some of the under-the-radar projects that Google has underway at the moment, and I was going to follow up with my take on what they are likely to do in the near future.
But something really annoying happened recently so I'm going to rant instead. Warning: strong opinions may follow, and names will be named!
First, though, the 30-second backgrounder for those who haven't been following my previous pieces on how search engines work or haven't read the Search Engines chapter in How To Build A Website And Stay Sane.
Search engines take the search terms you enter and show you a list of sites that match those terms, but in order to do that they have to determine a result ranking so the most relevant results are shown first. Each search engine has its own secret recipe that takes a variety of factors into account. Google's secret recipe is called the PageRank algorithm, and because website owners are always trying to "game the system" Google are continually tweaking the algorithm to weed out bad results. It's basically an arms race between the search engines and unscrupulous website operators.
The PageRank algorithm assigns a score to sites that have been processed, and the score is also referred to as the PageRank (or just "PR") for that site. The PR for a site can range from 0 (unranked) to 10 (the most amazingly relevant site in the entire world). A good PR is about 6, and anything above that is exceptional. Sites that have a high PR are more likely to appear at the top of search results, as you would expect. Every now and then Google apply an algorithm tweak and re-calculate the PR for all sites.
Enough background. On with the story. A British website called KinderStart.com has been operating for a while, providing categorised links to other sites that provide information relating to childcare. KinderStart themselves provide no content at all: it's really just a glorified bookmark list put online. Their entire revenue model is based on getting as much traffic as possible by appearing to be relevant to a huge range of searches related to childcare, with visitors then discovering they have to click through to other sites to get to the actual information they want. On the way through, though, all those visitors are shown ads which KinderStart have been paid to display.
In the industry that's referred to as a "link farm", and link farm operators are generally considered to belong to the seedy underbelly of the web. They are exactly the reason the PageRank algorithm is tweaked from time to time. Link farms get in the way of good search results and slow down people trying to get directly to the real content, and Google don't want them showing up high in search results.
So a little while ago Google did another PR update, and KinderStart saw their PR knocked straight to 0. Their traffic dropped by 70% because being a useless site they had almost no repeat visitors, didn't have many actual human referrals and relied pretty much entirely on high search engine results to gain traffic. Cool, no problem. Score another one for the good guys.
But then the idiots at KinderStart decided that this wasn't fair, and they had a *right* to a high PR and to appear high in the search results. How dare Google penalize them in favour of sites that provide actual content?
So they decided to take legal action against Google, demanding compensation for revenue losses from their decrease in traffic and claiming that Google had infringed on their "right to free speech"!
What the hell are they smoking? Do they think they have a *right* to high search engine rankings? If so, then why do they have more of a right than any of the other 77,568,867 sites on the net as of March 2006, particularly when most of those sites provide real content? And having a "right to free speech" has nothing to do with automatically giving everyone a broadcasting network so they can force their message on everyone. Sure, freedom of speech is an essential civil liberty, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to listen - particularly if it's just advertising!
That entitlement mentality really drives me nuts. *Nobody* is entitled to have their site appear in search engine results. Search engines are privately-run directory services, nothing more. If a directory decides they don't want to list your site, or they don't deem it provides enough value to warrant a high ranking, then bad luck. Suck it up and rethink your approach if that particular search engine matters enough to you. But don't assume that you have some innate right to have your site appear at the top of search results, and don't go off whinging that the search engine is infringing your "right to free speech" just because they don't want to give you their soapbox to shout from. If you want a soapbox, go and get your own.
Grrrr. Rant over. Normal programming will resume shortly.