Another bad press day for Google in the German paper FAZ, what's up this time around?
The roughly 90% search market share Google enjoys in Europe has attracted some valid criticism and free loaders who want a share of the company's revenue without lifting a finger to press a key. German intellectual property rights holders and paper print folks had their day in the media recently but the onslaught does not go away.
The new FAZ article expands on the theme previously raised by the chief of Axel Springer Verlag, which we discussed in the post Who's afraid of Google in a number of interesting ways.
First off, the article lead-in is brilliant.
By hooking into arguably outstanding soccer world cup match that saw Germany defeat Brazil with 7:1 and its reflection in social media, many readers will perk up.
The author swiftly accuses Google of standing out from pretty much everybody else by avoiding negative terms around the match and then swiftly accuses Google of manipulation and simply fashioning a "world according to Google".
An NPR piece about Google's experimental news center and tweaking the search algorithm in real time swiftly turns into the FAZ accusation of "newspeak" because Google decided not to have the negative terms "shame" or disgrace figure at the top of auto-complete and "News on Demand".
The author then claims that Google does this to get its "news" [his quotes] onto Twitter and facebook, the lands of happy news [says he].
Which may indicate that the FAZ does not look at Twitter or facebook very often.
As they do with the news, they do with the market.
Yes, Google has been known to rank products and services of its own and affiliates higher than expected or justified and has - so it seems - improved this.
But calling for an EU level anti-trust investigation for abuse of market power seems to be the fashion of the day. So much so that a depressingly non-sensical document out of review portal Yelp is served up as an illustration of Google abusing its power. To us K-Landnews folks Yelp has been one of the poster boys of tweaking its world, with allegations of bullying and a series of sad articles in papers small and big all the way to the Wall Street Journal.
Search for "yelp scandal", and don't use Google for it, you know.
The part of the FAZ article about Google vs. Yelp is based on a TechCrunch piece and somehow has lost the moderation of the TechCrunch headline's " How Yelp Thinks It’s Getting Screwed By Google".
Our own research into results from Google does not substantiate the level of credibility claimed by FAZ. There are slight differences but nowhere near as serious.
The "Yelp study" lacks all credibility, period.
The sweetest comparison by the FAZ is that, on the web, Google is akin to the power or water utilities in the traditional world.
Next to the badly digested example of Yelp, the utility comparison is a riot: I would love to have all the water and all the electricity I want and pay for it with my data.
If you do want to investigate Google, you should set up and extensive, fair way of measuring what's happening. This would include comparing Google results to those of other search engines.
Hint: you'll be surprised. Just try this one "Gary Danko Yelp" in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Startpage.
By the standards of the FAZ article you would have to accuse the traditional paper Yellow Pages of manipulating the world view of the users.
1) They had a 100% area monopoly.
2) They featured huge one or two page ads not marked as ads.
3) These large ads favored the advertisers over the regular one line small font guys.
4) The maps in the Yellow Pages were highly discriminative, giving prominence to only a small section of urban areas.
So, please quit yelping.
Disclaimer: We still don't own Google stock and still make only a couple of dollares a month with Google ads. Which you can completely block, unlike the full page Yellow Pages crap.
One more thing:
We are glad, the FAZ author missed this one: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2626515/Could-Google-fix-election-Researchers-search-ranking-influence-undecided-voters.html
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