A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there once was a great evil empire. Well, I'm not sure if it was evil, nor whether it was an empire, but nobody cares - if it was great, it must have been! As such, the Great Google is being carefully scrutinized all around the web for symptoms: has Google finally succumbed?
I recently read yet another worry by Dare Obasanjo about how Google has clearly drifted from the path of the light, and that this is to be expected given it's conflicts of interest (which he calls a strategy tax). Three examples are given. Google's income is dependant on ad-clicks, and these would potentially decline should normal search results become better, discouraging Google from improving search any more. Second, Google's (temporary?) use of "tips" - which are essentially ads that function like Google's normal adwords-based advertisements, but point to google's properties like picasa web albums - conflict with it's core advertising business. Finally, Dare suggests that google's may be fudging its search results, because, how else could a search for "mail" return gmail as a top hit, which is only linked 26500 times while yahoo mail is on spot 2 with 400000 links?
It's hard to imagine any objective metric that should make Gmail show up ahead of Yahoo! Mail in a search for the word "mail". Of course, this doesn't mean that Google is tampering with search results "by hand". Their algorithm can simply have allowances to rank sites in their domain or linked from their domain higher without having to actually sully their hands by tweaking individual results by hand. Still, if Google is how the world finds information and we are increasingly being pointed to information that financially benefits Google, doesn't that taint the much vaunted claim of the integrity of their search results even if it is being done in an automated manner?
On the topic of the search results for "mail": I think it's just much ado about nothing! Looking at the top search results on yahoo, Google and live, Google's are clearly more relevant, being the only one to name Hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail and mail.com right near the top. Google is growing very quickly and it's reasonable to be suspicious but a far simpler explanation is that Google's ranking algorithm is different - and superior (or maybe not?) - than that of the others for most queries.
There's also a simple reason why mail.yahoo.com has an enormous amount of irrelevant links: yahoo spams the mail of it's own users adding a tagline which contains a backlink to mail.yahoo.com. Furthermore, it's listed on all kinds of yahoo.com subdomains. If you just page through the actual results, most of the results past the first few pages are yahoo.com's own pages, which don't contain any content whatsoever related to yahoo mail beyond a menu button getting you there. There are only 268 results Google actually displays linking to mail.yahoo.com - the rest it considers duplicates. Links to gmail make it to 604, and far more of those are "real" sites, quite a few of which are blog posts quite like your Dare's - or this one ;-). Any good ranking algorithm _should_ weigh gmail as more controversial, recently talked about, mentioned, linked... and thus more relevant.
MapQuest vs. Google maps (another example Dare lists) follows in similar vein: although it's very likely that MapQuest, with it's longer history has many more links, what does that mean? 100000 links from 2001 (ancient history) on sites which are out of date and possibly full of dead links, on which potentially the only updated content is the ad-banner Google itself provides do not imply a great deal of relevance. It's not surprising hype-master google's doesn't need to fudge its search results to achieve that kind of relevance - people just don't shut up about them!
Finally, let's not forget that extracting meaning from a huge number of badly formatted, search-engine-"optimized", Google-gaming HTML documents isn't an exact science. It's not particularly convincing to see large swath's of the internet trying to interpret every piece of circumstantial, superficial evidence they find as some form of corruption.
It's ironic and slightly disturbing that google's is adding ads to their own websites, since the relative calm on the google's site was its most obvious killer feature at first. But that's pretty much as bad as it gets: Slightly Disturbing. Or should I say: Mostly Harmless?
If you're that worried about corruption, a better place to look would be to a certain government, which is adept at wasting almost 6 times the market capitalization of google's each year (while pretending to be losing merely 2). I guess the motto of the outgoing republican congress can best be described as So long, and thanks for all the fish! Now we all get to see whether the other guys can do any better...
