Do No Evil? April 30
About a month ago, those of us who follow changes in Google’s search result rankings with a level of enthusiasm usually reserved for sports franchises woke up to something frightening: The Dewey Update.
Google normally makes daily changes to their search result rankings, so finding yourself in position 3 when you were in position 4 yesterday is not abnormal. But it was quite shocking for many webmasters to wake up one morning and discover their site completely removed from Google’s search results.
Google’s primary goal should be to deliver the best (i.e., most relevant) search results to its users. This is what ensures that users will keep coming back and what maintains Google’s marketshare. However, the reasons behind this update (although impossible to pinpoint) appear to be focused on ranking Google’s internal pages higher than others.
After the update, Google Books search results were suddenly ranking close to the ever-dominant Wikipedia pages. In addition, Youtube and Google News content was being displayed prominently over other commercial listings. This looks like a blatant abuse of Google’s position. Their mantra “Do No Evil” implies a commitment to being fair and balanced—manipulating search results to put their own pages first is clearly an unfair tactic that hurts both users and webmasters.
Fortunately, this update was short lived. After Google’s spin master continue >>
