Comment by lll-o-lll
1 year ago
> Google has quite literally auctioned off result placement for two decades
Adwords - clearly marked as ads. Or are you suggesting the results themselves could be bought and sold? This was definitely not the case.
> Do you think that selling result placement for keywords and search terms to the highest bidder had a higher resilience to search engine optimisation than other search engines?
Again, manipulating the actual results via financial inducement to google was not a thing. Quite the reverse.
> A lot of their early competition around the world didn’t really do “search” as much as they did a combination of web content in a “portal” sort of presentation.
I’m not sure why you have this impression. There were many competitors for search prior and concurrent with google that operated in the same fashion. As I said earlier, they were simply hacked into uselessness. The concept of adversarial knowledge indexing was at this time new; PageRank was a novel and revolutionary solution.
> Adwords - clearly marked as ads. Or are you suggesting the results themselves could be bought and sold? This was definitely not the case.
Ad words spending had clear manipulations on the organic search algorithm. More spending meant better organic search placement. This is officially denied, but I saw this take place.
It is entirely possible that this would happen without manipulating the ranking algorithm. buy adds -> higher traffic -> higher ranking
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6366577?hl=en
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/142918?hl=en
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. These pages talk about how the ordering of marked adverts appear in results, not non-advert search results.
Having said that, I think it's clear the quality of non-ad search results isn't great, but I don't know if that's due to perverse incentives on Google's side or just the increasing sophistication of SEO defeating Google's relevance ranking.
> I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. These pages talk about how the ordering of marked adverts appear in results, not non-advert search results.
It also describes the situation as it is now, not how it was when Google still cared about search results. The paid ads didn't use to be part of the search resuls list at all but instead were clearly delineated.