My Message To Google: Stop Cheating
How fair is Google search algorithm? Not at all, when Google self has services of it's own.
A post from TechCrunch by Andrew Keen has the whole story. Here is a part:
A post from TechCrunch by Andrew Keen has the whole story. Here is a part:
In mid February, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt expressed pride in Google employee Wael Ghonim’s brave struggle against the autocratic Mubarak regime to establish political transparency in Egypt. “We are very, very proud of what Wael and that group was able to do in Egypt,” Schmidt said in Barcelona. But what Schmidt needs to do now is apply Ghonim’s views about political transparency to Google’s own search business.
With its 70% control of the global online search market, Google’s power to make and break online businesses is unrivalled. So it’s not surprising that website owners want more transparency over the reasons why the often autocratic Google sometimes impose penalties on their businesses. But a report issued last week by the newsnavigator OneNewsPage found a distinct lack of transparency in the search business with 88% of respondents saying that paid search advertising costs lacked transparency, while 24% said that they had experienced large, unexplained falls in site traffic.
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Edelman’s scientific research is the real reason why Google sucks. Taking each of the 2,642 terms listed on Google’s Health Topics index page, the Harvard academic found that all 2,642 of these individual searches resulted in a link to Google Health appearing in the “absolute top of the page.” Edelman discovered the same unnatural biases with stock ticker searches on Google. Here, he found, that the links from any stock ticker search—“the large-type all-caps ticker symbol, the large price chart, and the left-most details link”—will always take you to Google Finance, even though Google’s in-house financial service is far from being a market leader in this sector.
Google’s bias isn’t just limited to finance and health. In a January 2011 paper, “Measuring Bias in Organic Web Search,” written with Harvard Business School doctoral candidate Benjamin Lockwood, Edelman found that Google listed its own map service as the first result when a user queries “maps.” It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that Edelman and Lockwood discovered that 86% of map searches conducted on Google end up with the user clicking on Google Maps.
So much, then, for the neutrality of Google search, the digital librarian on which we all-too-innocently trust to navigate our way around today’s knowledge economy...
