TL;DR: Lamentably, Google has facilitated a transition to organic search results being strictly a money game for most categories, removing the joy of discovery and disproportionally impacting small businesses.<p>What's missing is a suggestion of how to fix it. Not an easy problem.
TL;DR: Google is giving users what they want instead of what I want, please change this.<p>Seriously, what this guy wants is a search engine that promotes what he wants over what users want. He fails to understand that Google became popular specifically because it didn't do that.
And yet the images he used in his letter came from Shutterstock, rather than directly contacting a photographer and checking they're okay with their image being used to illustrate the point he's making.<p>Not saying this isn't a problem, just that he doesn't like it when it brings him less money, yet he uses it in other industries because it's convenient.<p>Having some way to filter out the big agglomerators would be nice - obviously you can use 'buy used car -autotrader', but the majority of users don't realise they can do that, even if they would like to.
Gah! SEO posts are so tedious and annoying.<p>Maybe if your business depends mostly on search traffic to survive it shouldn't.<p>Further more publicly announcing that you must be entitled to it is embarrassing, specially when the plea is a thinly veiled "you used to be better" diatribe.<p>If it was written as a bug report I would be more sympathetic, as it would identify specific problems, highlight desired behavior and suggest a solution, but more importantly it would be brief and to the point.
"There is however one area of Google’s vast and growing empire that gives rise for serious concern and this is its foundation, “Google Search”, the most used and admired search engine on planet Earth and in fact, our solar system, unless Jupiter’s moons are hiding a quantum search tool."<p>If this is how he always writes then no wonder his stuff isn't ranked higher. Eschew obfuscation!
Okay. It's not Google's goal to provide the absolute best answer. They just want to avoid a wrong answer while providing an acceptable answer for a majority of searchers. Google has over-valued authority domains at the cost of smaller sites/blogs that have rich/deep/narrow content. Faking an authority domain is difficult using black-hat seo techniques so it's the sledge hammer that Google uses today. So yes, big sites are rewarded and the little guys are locked out if they try and compete.
Don't really understand his point. Just because he is a little business and hates big brands doesn't mean users in general don't want big brands preferred in their search results. If someone is searching for a music video, yes, they most often mean the big brand currently at the top of the charts. If they are searching for electronics, yes BestBuy probably gives them better results than a tiny shop. Google does track clicks on results, so they do know which results the users actually prefer.
I don't think Google Search's goal was to ever help the user discover an unknown business. Its to give the user the best results for their search term (which, surprise, is the more popular businesses).<p>Not strictly on topic, but a post like this is hard to read with so many exclamation points! Just make your dramatic point through logic, don't force it on the reader via punctuation!
This guy is ranking pretty good for most of the circle jerk linking scheme on the bottom of his page (which violates Google's policy - LOL if they slap him).