The Carry On Life

Value and the State of Google Search Results

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” –Albert Einstein

Lately, this quote has a made a lot of sense to me. Striving for success is such an ambiguous task, but it’s fairly easy to determine whether your actions are producing a value–taking the raw elements around you and building something useful. Unfortunately, I think that this idea is largely forgotten in the States. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of innovative spirit here. Just look at all the startups out there that are attempting to produce something valuable to their users. Most of them fail, but they usually do so when they don’t produce a value. In the long run, these guys stick around when their users find them too useful to let go. As long as you consistently enrich everything you’re involved with, you needn’t worry whether you’ll succeed in the end.

Let’s hear the ‘financial engineers’ of today explain what value, exactly, they are adding to our financial system. You’d think after the subprime mortgage catastrophe, we’d be more wary of bundling a bunch of questionable investments, slicing them up and reselling them, yet that’s exactly what we’re faced with again. I’m no financial expert and I’m not going to try to explain the current problem of toxic investments. You can ask Google about that, as cleverly use this to foray into my topic-in-mind:

I’ve been learning a lot these days, among other things, about how search engine optimization works and how the people behind it think. There’s supposedly some rift between us developers and SEO people, but I’ve never been one to jump on any side of a fight. Instead I’ve decided to analyze the situation through the lens of value. Optimizing your content to be better indexed is excellent. In fact, I often go to unreasonable length to ensure my HTML adheres to proper semantics, that is, making sure any tabular data is in a table, any lists are actually lists, each section, article, item, etc is properly classified rather than just wrapping everything in a DIV. My belief is that any smart indexing agent (Google) out there ought to be able to make sense of the content and do with it accordingly.

However, there’s another face to SEO, which I wouldn’t really consider “search engine optimization” anymore than I’d consider door-to-door evangelizing “gospel reception optimization.” Optimizing your content is all well and good and if you have something that is of value to your visitors, it will naturally earn it’s place among search results. Not very far beyond that, I’d consider it nothing more than Google gaming. Of course, companies are always going to pay to get an edge on their competitors, but it becomes very problematic when there’s a potential for the game itself to benefits from the dirty play.

There’s a lot of hubbub about the poor quality of Google search results due to scrapers redistributing content (that is freely available elsewhere) with the addition of a hefty helping of ads. That’s SEO at it’s worst. These guys have done absolutely nothing to add value to the internet. They may try to argue that they’re making the content easier to find for users that are looking for it, but that’s clearly not the case when searching for a specific Apache error message returns you two identical results, one from Server Fault and one from eFreedom.

It seems like it would be child’s play for Google to allow users to ban specific sites from their results or even have a “downvote” system to denote what one is not looking for. There’s plenty of plugins and add-ons to do the job, but for me at least, modifying my web pages client side is a very dirty hack. But let’s consider Google’s stake in this situation. These scraper sites that game their search ranking are serving up, you guessed it, AdSense ads. I don’t want to be all tinfoil hat here, but there’s at least something to consider here. If they added a social ranking mechanism, they could potentially lose revenue.

So, at best, we have a search company that needs to re-think its ranking algorithm and at the very worst, we have a self-feeding search monster that takes advantage of our confidence in its ability to produce us with the content we seek. Google needs to seriously reconsider how it can best provide value to it’s users in this regard, because we can’t expect the leeches that game their rankings up to do so. It’s too easy for them to make big money just be re-appropriating free content.