Re: Beating a Dead Horse

>Google has never stated that they provide search results
>to aid in commercial endeavors that are simply a scheme
>to make money.

...apart from revenues earned by Google, of course -- a company with a
market cap now exceeding that of IBM. AdSense, moreover, is most
definitely a Google service having the sole, clear purpose of promoting
"schemes to make money", not least in the form of monetary benefit to
Google. The extent to which the web is now used by all and sundry users
to buy or sell products and services is growing exponentially. And
"schemes to make money" are the sole basis of Google revenues. So with
all due respect, any assertion that Google does not "aid in commercial
endeavors" is blatantly absurd.

"Commercialization" of the early internet was stoutly resisted by
academic types who enjoyed its use at public cost and felt themselves
morally entitled to such exclusive use because of the "purity" of their
free use of such resources, ("free" meaning it was paid for entirely by
others). Most resources of the internet are now paid for by *private*
operators at their own expense. Those selling products are sought out
by those wishing to buy them, and there is no logical basis to assume
such buyers would regard their lives as being any less "enriched" by
satisfaction of the information they receive than are those who seek
out, say, an online copy of Caeser's "Gallic Wars", the poems of Emily
Bronte, or daily entries in the Dilbert Blog.

The very idea that any third party should decide for others what is
more or less "enriching" smacks of the very same elitist fascism that
once barred most ordinary people outside military/university
environments from ANY use of the internet. And had that snobbish
regime continued, there would today be no such thing as Google, eBay,
or Amazon, and most of us would be paying higher prices for many goods
and services now more accessible via the web. The web is about
lowering transaction costs -- whether to obtain commercial goods or to
obtain other "enriching" services. It is not about anything else.

It is up to the customer to decide whether obtaining a specific good or
service is "enriching", and whether or not the price paid for it in
time or money is worthwhile. It is likewise irrational to assume
products and services obtainable only by payment of real money are
anything but "enriching" to the customer willing to pay for them.
Indeed, it is contrary to both logic and experience to make such an
assumption. Does anyone pay for anything (apart from taxes) for
receipt of any good or service which he does not feel to be personally
"enriching"? Surely not.

The flaw in the logic of relying on link-value as a measure of
relevancy or prominance is that it rests on the sole assumption that
quantity measures quality. False. Or at least not necessarily true.
Some specialty web sites may not have a lot of links (or any, for that
matter), even though they may dominate a very narrow niche market. But
bigger companies that also happen to carry the same product, even if of
significantly inferior quality, will dominate listings for that
specific market segment merely because the bigger site as a *whole* has
more external links.

The market for button-hooks is arguably pretty limited, for example,
but for a few specific customers who *need* button hooks to dress up in
period costumes, these may be of vital interest and high value. When
these minisculely few customers search on "button hooks for sale", they
can reasonably expect the few specialty sites to pop to the top of the
search listings -- as they do -- whether or not such sites are linked
to from outside, and regardless of whether those offerings are widely
desired by a great many people. Indeed, part of the real value of
search engines is the ability to drill down to even the most obscure
information -- whether or not paid for. But if eBay has an advertised
listing for "button hooks", that listing will be immediately promoted
high on the list, not because of the excellence of the product offered
for sale, but because eBay itself has a high overall ranking, even if
the button-hook on offer is broken, bent, and virtually unusable.

There have been some rather interesting posts elsewhere suggesting
Google is actively demoting smaller sites not paying for ad services in
favor of promoting larger ones that are paying for ad services. That
allegation has not (and probably cannot) be proven. The "how many
outside links do you have" criterion, however, plainly re-enforces
promotion of "big" (meaning "paid for" advertised) sites over "small"
ones to the benefit of Google profits -- a truly bizarre definition of
"enrichment" in the eyes of anyone not a Google stockholder or
employee.

Furher, the claim that demoting minor business and non-business players
aids conservation of Google resources wasted on less-weighted listings
is way beyond laughable. The resources wasted on duplicate and expired
listings obviously receives little or no focused attention by Google,
given the only reliable way to dump old page listings is for the
*webmaster* (not Google) to go remove them by hand, one by one.
Consider for a moment just how primitive this method is and how
unimportant it really is in the scheme of things becomes immediately
obvious. That which has real priority gets budgetary support to be
solved. It is a basic law of organizations that goals resourced are
important and achieved, and others not resourced are neither --
regardless of management claims and marketing hype.

The often stated claim that Google "automatically" dumps old pages when
robots.txt and/or HTTP responses repeatedly indicate the pages are
excluded or have expired is pure, unadulterated flap-doodle. Once a
page is found and listed, the robots.txt file has no observable effect.
Neither do repeated HTTP denials of access cause Google to quit
requesting them. At least not for a very long time. And even then
they aren't removed. Google plainly cares little for how much disk
space houses hopeless and misleading junk and waste, else they would
not still be carrying a virtually complete set of *duplicate* pages for
our test site, as evidenced by the fact we have consistently denied all
search engines access for more than six months. We have never yet
sought SEO, this site is low on page-ranking, and yet all these old
URLs continue to be listed after the valid ones, long after Google
finally (mostly) gave up trying to retrieve them. I therefore see ZERO
evidence that Google fastidiously rids itself of aged, duplicate, and
irrelevant content listings, and low page-ranking is plainly no
criterion for removing dead content. Something else appears plainly is
afoot if live, valid content is being removed from listings,
particularly from sites having higher page rankings. Any assumption
that changes occuring on Google SELS are to diminish loss of costly
resources appears to be utterly imaginary.

Google is a business doing what's good for Google, and what's good for
Google is maximum net revenues. Small commercial sites being laid low
in the SELs are not a revenue problem for Google, and any superficial
chatter about various "improvement" of search results appears solely
aimed to further "improve" Google corporate ad revenues. Google is
assuredly engaged in "a scheme to make money" of huge extent,
godbless'em, and personal "enrichment" is no more their motive than it
is for any other businesses which must satisfy its paying customers to
remain profitable.

It is therefore necessary to remain clear about who are Google's
customers. They are *not* the people who conduct on line searches.
Nor are they smaller sites not paying for advertising space. The real
customers are those who write frequent checks to Google, and
particularly those who write larger ones. They define Googles real
purpose, and whatever satisfaction may be provided to search engine
users (and non-revenue web sites) is entirely incidental to that end.