Thread: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

Steven Levy wrote up an interesting article How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web.

I like Levy because he tends to stuff more details into his articles than most writers.

Bing is starting to give Google a run for the money. Though as the article pointed out, Google can adapt to change and will be hard to beat.

Bing is terrible result wise IMO, and I am saying that from a user's and not SEO perspective. But they have some marketing power behind it, so who knows.

Google will stay at the top for a while, but I like Bing. Yahoo is a very unstable search engine, rankings vary like seasons.

From my experience Google send a lot more traffic than his competitors, but if I compare all the referral queries that convert into sales, Bing and Yahoo have much more quality traffic with a higher potential to convert into sales.

So for e-commerce, traffic doesn't mean much if we don't sell.

Google try to re-write the concept of internet, which was a way to discover new unknown informative sites, artisans sites, small business online, anyway something different and accessible for everyone.

Now they want to be the top quality search engine, not anymore the most popular search engine. Google look much more like a Christmas tree with ads everywhere and viral ads pictures mostly in the middle of their pages, but that's not only the worse. The worse is the metamorphosis from the search engine function into the web/tv concept. To be honest I wasn't going on internet to find out that internet is looking now like TV and commercials associated.

What Google is claiming to offer is not what it intends to do. Look all the companis Google buy, and the spams are still there. It is easier to ask to legitimate webmasters to increase the quality of their sites, than really fight spammers and improve their search engine.

Fighting spammers don't bring money to Google so it is not their main goal, really who cares besides the webmasters spammed?

I guess Bing and Yahoo (if they receive the authorization to use the Bing Algo) will continue to take away some market from Google if they don't change their policies.

I didn't realize until I clicked through to the article that it was from back in March. I read it back then, but agree it is still a very good read.
I think google does a great job. Unless google stumbles, it will be hard for bing to de-throne the king.
I've done the same search on both numerous times, and google just always seems to have better results, in my opinion.

Google is still the king no doubt about that, but the new path they are taking is maybe not the best. I believe that Google need to stick with his old philosophy which give a chance for all kind of webmasters and stop thinking like Wall Street people that tend to spay all over. At this game sooner or later they will be slaves from any corporation investors watching only the statistics and stock market trends.

I guess Google needs to put back themselves not only in the user shoes but rather the webmasters shoes.

After all, internet is made from webmasters which bring users, search engines are only there to serve the user queries. I also believe that it is not the job of search engines to decide the level of quality site but rather the internet users.

It is all about control, money and monopoly for some people, perhaps not the best way to give a good user experience.