Does Google have the needed objectivity with their own products?

Johannes Beus
Google has, unquestionably, developed a great searchengine over the years. Their quality is uniformly better than that of their competitors, ease of use for their basic functions is self-explanatory and their market share is growing constantly – at least in those western markets where they have not yet reached 90 percent.

What do the SERPs for the following keywords have in common: Berlin, Hamburg, München, Köln, Frankfurt but also Deutschland, Frankreich, Italien, USA? – correct, Google first produces a “hit” from Google Maps for all of them. Just to make sure this is not too inconspicuous they also add a small map and an entry-form for Google's route-planer. On a side note, we do not know how Karstadt thinks about the fact that a search for their company name first leads to a map for the 6000 resident village of “Karstädt“.

The problem here is that the users trust Google's objectivity. Usually if a site is ahead in the Google-SERPs, it is so because Google's algorithms decided on it – not because the editor liked the background color so much or because the site-operators advertisement budget was large enough. Now that Google is abandoning this principle to use its SERPs for promotional purposes there is the chance that, over a period of time, users will loose their confidence in Google. Expansions like “Universal Search”, which beautify the SERPs and make them more multimedia-based are one thing. In that case Google only changes how the results are displayed. To manually edit nearly all results for German cities and a multitude of countries, as is being done at the moment, is in a whole league of its own.
Johannes Beus - on Mon (05/26/2008) at 15:55 PM

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