Here’s where you should be thinking, “What the hell is Google’s auction system?” And this was the man’s explanation (keep in mind that this guy is a higher up in the company, and he’s telling an entire team of people this):
According to him, Google
has been able to take advantage of the long tail model by utilizing an auction system that charges everybody. It doesn’t price anyone completely out of the picture, and it’s automated in such a way that they can profitably conduct transactions for $50 (or even $5 or $10) because they are, after all, a huge search engine displaying hundreds of results for millions of search terms. His example of how Google’s “auction system” works was that if you want your page to show up in Google, you need to pay, say, $30 to be listed on maybe the 200th page, but you can increase your bid and show up on the 7th or 8th page, and you can pay even more to show up on the first page of results. However, Mr. Upper Member of Regional Management made it quite clear that you can’t buy the first search result on Google because “Google needs to protect their product’s integrity and preserve some relevancy with searches.”
Dear God. I feel like a movie goer shouting “Don’t open that door! The killer’s behind there!” at the movie screen. This guy actually believes that the organic rankings are arranged via a Google-approved bribery system (and yes, he was referring to the organic rankings and not the paid ad platform). If this were the case, do you realize how many PPC (pills, porn, casino) sites would dominate the top of the SERPs (oh sorry, every position but #1, because, after all, Google has a reputation to keep)? Any site with the most money would rank supreme. Does this guy not realize that, logistically, this is an absolutely and wholeheartedly piss poor way to structure a search engine’s rankings? Relevance would fly out the window in exchange for cold hard cash. I would imagine that user experience would be extremely negative, and Google certainly wouldn’t be the top search engine if they operated on a platform like this.
The absolute worst thing about these examples is that these come from prominent business people who are “educating” uninformed people within their organization. All they’re doing is spreading blatant misinformation to their staff, with most of these people being too uneducated or unaware about search to really question what they’re being told. I get so frustrated when I hear about instances like the two I just shared. At least with my relatives I can (try to) explain in a basic yet correct way how search engine algorithms work and why they see the results that appear when they perform a search. With misinformed people you have to try and “rehabilitate” them and convince them that yes, search engines actually drive traffic, yes, people actually make purchases online, and no, Google is not essentially a prostitute of a search engine. And this is all too often an uphill battle. Where these people get their crazy ideas is beyond me. I blame MTV.
Sigh. I think I know how Bruce Wayne feels. You save Gotham from peril and not only do you not get a thank you or any sort of appreciation, but some other a-hole breaks out of Arkham Asylum and runs amok, forcing you to have to save the day again.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I think the search industry needs a Commissioner Gordon.
