It is nothing new; Google has been manipulating search engine results for a long time. Shit happens, man – what can I say? The entire world screamed at Google when someone blew a whistle on how the company had favored JC Penney – and that was a long time ago. People forgot about it; they moved on.

Why anyone doesn’t give a Flea’s Ass?

If Google is favoring a certain number of big shots – what does it have to do with you? Of course, nothing. As long as you are from the majority of World Wide Web population that only searches for things, it’s okay.

But what if you are a webmaster, an affiliate marketer or someone whose livelihood depends on Google search results? You build a website and pour in hours of hard work. Maybe you don’t even have enough money to hire someone to do the SEO – so you do overtime. The investment doesn’t return much, however.

There were good days when Google actually didn’t have so many filters for search results. Especially, before the Penguin Update fiasco, everything wasn’t that bad. On the flip side, though, Black Hat SEO guys were misusing Google. Kids, with their ‘Google Sniper’ programs and how to get rich quick website schemes were everywhere.

In some criterions, the search engine results were genuinely screwed. You’d see spam websites, and then a list of informative websites pending over Page 2, Page 3 – so on and so forth. Still, there were honest people who depended on Google for a lot of things. These red blooded men had a lot of stuff tied to Google search results.

Penguin came – it prevailed and it Effed many businesses in the butt. But as long as you are just an ordinary guy/ girl who is only interested in searching for what he/she needs, you’re okay. In actuality, search results and terms, such as: SERP, only matters to people who make money off of it.

How FTC Wasted Taxpayer Money and Never Really Stood Against Google?

Taxpayer money is your hard earned cash that the government takes from you. It is more like stealing in many scenarios. Anyway, the FTC conducts an investigation against Google and finds out that Google has been manipulating search results. In the end, despite of all the evidence, the FTC guys don’t proceed against Google!

Why? The truth is that even if Google skillfully shuffles search results to favor some websites, CONSUMERS don’t give a shit. It is the average number of internet users that is unaffected or the least concerned about which website is ranking where for XXXX number of keywords. For all they know, they long on to the internet, they open Google and simply type in their terms.

Last Thursday, when the FTC decided not to go against Google AFTER torching your taxpayer dollars on 19 months of investigation, what happened? Did the sun rise from the West that day? No, life went on. As a matter of fact, maybe you didn’t even notice anything. FTC respondents said, “Google is only looking to improve the quality of its search results. Any negative impact on actual or potential competitors was incidental to that purpose.”

Sorry Microsoft, Sorry Yelp and Sorry Travelocity:

Clearly, Microsoft and Travelocity were not happy with how the FTC ruled out its investigations against Google. Especially, Yelp had a special reason to be pissed off because of how Google had been playing with the snippets data lately. Besides, all three of these names are competitors against Google – and they were hoping to see some damage here.

Yelp, Microsoft and Travelocity did submit evidence against Google. For instance, some results from Zagat, one of Google’s owned review site, were being given more priority over Yelp’s. Google’s arch enemies said that consumers were not getting good results, even when Yelp or some other company was spending more money in Google based ad campaigns.

FT also suggested that Google results were deprioritizing its competitors’ results. For instance, some rival sites were being pushed down because of the websites that Google favored more. However, Google was sticking to its age old argument that whatever’s happening, it is happening because of the algorithm update.

And If someone raised fingers against Google updates, the company would say that the algorithm only selected quality websites, which means that if a rival’s website tanked, it was all because of the poor quality of information. In its defense, Google said that all it was trying was to improve search results for consumers.

What Do You Think?

You probably don’t have much to say about this incident. But if you are a webmaster who relies on Google Search Results for his/her website, you do give a damn about it. Please give voice to your opinion. Maybe we can all work together to create a revolution in favor of fair search results.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2013 at 5:43 AM and is filed under National News, Tech Norms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.