Belgium Google Dust Up
July 18, 2011
Short honk: The goose was incorrect. The goose believed that Google would not manually intervene in search results. The goose is shattered. Navigate to “After Copiepresse “Boycott,” Google Restores Search of News Sites”. If the story is accurate, there seems to be an allegation that Google had imposed a “so called boycott” of the Copiepresse newspapers. I thought Google was an algorithm baby. Now it seems that humans do shape search results. Implications? Lots. What about sites affected by Panda? Algorithm or manual intervention? What about relevance? Algorithm or human? What about big advertisers’ position in results sets? Algorithm or human?
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2011
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One Response to “Belgium Google Dust Up”
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I think the bigger issue the linked article points to is that of possible violations of antitrust on Google’s part. What I mean by this is that if Google is using content from other sites, pushing the site down or excluding it from the search results altogether, isn’t that a clear example of a business using its market share to deliberately create a monopoly and eliminate competition?
To answer your question, maybe a combination of both human and algorithmic content curation is best. But I think that’s really a lesser issue when the evidence of possible antitrust violation is considered.