A blog about computers, open source, software and other perceptions gained over the years as a sysadmin.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Microsoft and the case against Google.

Microsoft have initiated a probe into Googles search rankings on Google search. The reason they say is that Google push competing companies down in the results.

This is utter bullshit to be frank and its not in any way proven or even plausible that Google push for eg. Foundem down. First of all its an aggregator that pulls content from all over and does not bring much of original content. Those are always ranked lower than the original content. Second the site in question is technically a howto about how not to make your site SEO friendly. Third, its not a popular site which itself makes it rank low when people who get it up as a result in their searches click something else instead. This link has a rebuttal for Foundem.

Foundem are a member of Microsoft founded ICOMP and CIAO! are owned by Microsoft Bing. It stinks and it stinks bad. The french legal search engine ejustice.fr have also filed a complaint but i fail to see where they compete with Google.

Most important of all, Googles search algoritm is very well explained and is well understood. Its hard to manipulate with SEO and is partly based on what users are clicking on. Even if you manage to get your site to show up high with SEO tricks if its not what people search for it will fall down in the results when its not what they was out to find.

The french ejustice.fr complaint is pretty strange. If i search for "legal search france" on bing i dont find it at all in the first 40 results. On altavista i just gave up after 60 results and the only way to find it was to use "ejustice" but that didnt put it better than place 7 in the results. One thing i learned was that there are tons and tons of legal search engines.

It seems ejustice.fr for starters wont show up in other search engines either and secondly have stiff competition from other identical services. It seems right now as if their complaint are that Google does not rank it much much higher than any other search engine.

CIAO! is complaining about standard terms and conditions which is funny. Read an Microsoft EULA from top to bottom, get help translating it into human language and think for a minute, how on earth could you do any worse than that? Then compare it with Googles terms and conditions. It will be an eye opening experience, i promise.

Some links for the interested ones:

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