The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO

Government regulation of search? So now we have a <i>right</i> to be included in the top of search results? Whenever someone says that "free trade has broken down" you know what they really mean is "I want to use the government to my advantage because I can't compete in the market."

Of all the nonsense that I've heard about government regulation this has to be the #1 in a long long time.<p>If a search engine gets enough traction with the general public then there will be people who will try to game the system. This will cause two things to happen, the engines being gamed will adapt and those that don't will be replaced by something better.<p>It's an arms race, and no amount of 'regulation' is going to curb it.<p>You might as well try to outlaw evolution. (I'm sure it's been tried though...)

If you read his opening analogy without thinking it was a reference to SEO, you might assume it was about, say, books. I suspect that it's easier to get a web page read than a book distributed (if the author of the essay would like, we can have a race -- I will create a page and see if I can get it visited by a major search engine faster than he can get a book sold at a major chain).<p>Maybe Google isn't doing a good job. Maybe SEOs (like me) are manipulating search results in a way that's harmful to consumers. But in a capitalist economy, the way you say "That could be done better" is to, well, do it better. Or find someone who does it better, and use them instead of Google.

So search is broken and the solution is to bring our government into it to monitor and regulate it? What about foreign based search engines?<p>This is bad all around.

The author is an executive at a private company and has anonymously written an article calling for transparency, disclosure and government regulation in the online search industry. This is utter garbage.

His analogies portraying search engines as "borders" or "gates" are ridiculous. Without search engines most of his "streets" or "islands" of content won't ever be discovered by users. Pre-google Internet was small, categorized and somewhat boring. Search engines don't create borders or gates, they're expanding the "continents".<p>Moreover, I find google search results to be extremely accurate. Yes, some of our competitors are ranked higher than us in organic search results. That's because they've been around longer, their products have more reviews on independent blogs and they have more existing users. Yes, as a user searching for "XYZ" more often than not I mean to find the most popular "XYZ" at the moment, not the most innovative startup that's trying to displace "XYZ".<p>What I don't like is Google's adwords system. If something's broken, you're fucked and there is no customer service or an explanation what happened. It's like me coming back home to find out that my landlord changed the locks and won't pick up a phone number so I won't even be able to get my shit out of the apartment. Yes, it's illegal for landlords to do that but GOOG can.

I am not sure how regulation is really going to help anyone except the black hat SEOs. If anything it will just make things worse by slowing down the ability of google to respond to black hat SEO and creating a more bureaucratic form of whose hand do I grease to get on the first page. I am not sure the author really grasps the scale that they are playing, or maybe he is sick of playing on that scale.<p>The author states that the only the large players can afford to reverse engineer googles current ranking algorithm.<p>However I don't see how forcing them to publish the exact algorithms would create any meaningful change for the "better". The big players will still game the system if anything they will be more successful as they will be able to move resources from reverse engineering to exploiting, and will have a larger time frame where an approach is viable due to red tape.<p>The little guys will probably be just as bad off with roughly the same rule of thumbs they have today.

The Time Has Come To Regulate Techcrunch

SEO people can be good-but they really need to stop the whining. Google doesn't owe anything to them-you don't hear Adware people for the PC complaining to MS that they need to reveal all the internals of the OS so they can better design nasty software do you?

<i>That said, the primary methodology for all users to reach any individual website destination is still search, of either paid or organic listings.</i><p>I don't know about that. I've had around 10.000 visitors to my blog in the last few days. No paid search, and around 10 referrers from Google search. The rest from social news sites, twitter, bookmark sites and other places that have nothing to do with Google.

The argument is flawed since Google derives its indexes from the links contained within content itself. To use their metaphor: "Imagine if you went to Los Angeles and the easiest restaurants to find were were those most recommended by the the owners of the other places"

All essential infrastructure on the net, like domain name servers, should be regulated. Since search engines is becoming and essential part of the infrastructure, it should be regulated too.<p>The European Union has sponsored a search engine project for some years now. I would rather trust them than a private search engine company.

Hey, let's regulate "e-mail marketing" while we're at it. Pfft. Whatever.

Isn't search is becoming mature? And once that happens, will it be any different than the Yellow Pages? Won't most of the talent exit the marketplace and then it leave it to the bureaucrats and such?