Search Scandals!

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We’ve recently seen a spate of search-related scandals in the news. The juiciest, of course, involved website DecorMyEyes, which allegedly used bad publicity to increase its visibility on Google. The owner would harass and threaten his customers and then brag that their online ranting and complaining was only increasing his business by boosting his Google ranking. Google denies the claim that bad publicity helps in this way. Regardless, they took action against the company — and so did the Feds: “The merchant, Vitaly Borker, 34, who operates a Web site called decormyeyes.com, was charged with one count each of mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats and cyberstalking. The mail fraud and wire fraud charges each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The stalking and interstate threats charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.”

More recently, J C Penney made headlines, first for their remarkable success in online sales over the holidays, and then for the way they did it. Doug Pierce, a search expert hired by The New York Times to investigate Penney’s dominance in a number of searches, said the campaign was “the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of.” “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.” Penny, or a contractor acting on their behalf, gamed google by paying ”to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com.” Not surprisingly, Google took measures to demote the company in search results when presented with evidence of its wrongdoing.

And, of course, we cannot forget the recent twist in the ongoing battle between Bing and Google. As you may have heard, Google got suspicious about Bing’s search results and ran some tests, the results of which led Google to claim that Microsoft’s search engine is copying its results:

The claim came after the California-based Web behemoth ran a test that, it says, demonstrates that some of Bing’s search results came directly from Google. The company temporarily altered some of its algorithms so that, for example, a search for “mbzrxpgjys,” which would normally produce zero or a few irrelevant results, turned up a link to the website of Research in Motion. After a while, Google said, an identical search on Bing started producing the same result.

Microsoft did not deny the claim, but said that Google’s results are one of the more than 1,000 signals it uses to compile its own search listings.

Bing’s response was that they don’t copy the results but rather gather information from the browsing behavior of people who use the Bing toolbar. This means that they keep track of the most popular pages linked to specific search terms. Sometimes this behavior involves a visit to Google, sometimes not. But the data itself does not come from Google, so it’s not copying. This explanation goes a long way toward satisfying charges that it copies its rivals work, but opens up a whole new can of worms regarding its practice of tracking its customers’ online activity! And if the Bing toolbar is doing it, what about that Google toolbar? Here’s the word from Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who originally broke the story:

Meanwhile, I’m on my third day of waiting to hear back from Google about just what exactly it does with its own toolbar. Now that the company has fired off accusations against Bing about data collection, Google loses the right to stay as tight-lipped as it has been in the past about how the toolbar may be used in search results.

Google’s initial denial that it has never used toolbar data “to put any results on Google’s results pages” immediately took a blow given that site speed measurements done by the toolbar DO play a role in this. So what else might the toolbar do?

That’s it for now. We’ll be sure to keep you updated as more scandals roll in from Search Land.

More on the web:
David Segal, “A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web,” The New York Times (11/26/2010).
—, “U.S. Arrests Online Seller Who Scared Customers,” The New York Times (12/06/2010).
—, “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search,” The New York Times (2/12/2011).
Erica Alini, “Even Microsoft uses Google,” Macleans.ca (2/11/2011).
Danny Sullivan, “Bing: Why Google’s Wrong In Its Accusations,” Search Engine Land (2/4/2011).