Google's "Don't be evil" as motivator to fight SEO

I don't agree.
Google is no longer providing the best results, it's providing lots of ads, and its own services.
When I search for a product, I want to see items relevant to me, not 3 YouTube videos, a Wallmart listing and three paid ads from the same companies over and over and over again.
I don't want a Wiki page about the invention of the thing I'm looking for, and I don't want to see Yelp pages with their protection racket tactics of extortion and blackmail.

Say I'm looking for a new TV in the UK, I don't need all the trash Google now serves me, I want a list of pages from shops selling those TV's, and I want a varied selection of them to browse through. I want these pages brought to me based on their content and geographic location, not on how much money they spend on ads with Google, nor how many times that company has taken a Google employee out to dinner or lent them use of their French ski cabin for a weekend.
I don't want to be inundated with the largest corporations on the planet and fed pages and pages of trash to wade through.

Google has deliberately manipulated the entire searching public. When you look for a product on Google, you get ads in the top, at the bottom, at the side, and you get so much confusing rubbish amongst it that you're almost DIRECTED to their own shopping pages. Is this a coincidence? Of course not, they analyze every pixel on the page, they have so much information at their fingertips they know that confusing a searcher looking for a product *just enough* is going to drive them to their own shopping pages.

Every move Google makes is designed to increase profit. It's not about making search better for you, it's about forcing you through a Google channel and giving them another cut of the sale. As a result, it's causing millions of small businesses pain and damage, forcing people out of work and closing down small companies all over the world, in favor of those who can pay Google to further beat the small business out of the market entirely.

If you are selling products, there are only a few things you can do when it comes to Google...

1. Provide lead-in information pages which are capable of competing against the biggest corporations, ancillary pages such as product reviews and opinion pieces.
2. Grab visitors when they arrive and try to get them on a mailing list, bypassing the need to rely on Google for their attention in the future.
3. Create entirely unique product pages. Not every product is sold by one of those massive corporations, so you could get lucky with a selection of them.
4. Offer something those massive corporations cant - a Human to welcome them, to make them laugh, to give them the information and help they want.

 

Well said. There was a time when you could go to main street and the would be a store selling shoes, another selling clothes, another selling baked goods. Walmart killed all of that. Google has now become the online version of this scenario.

 

As Google's market share is holding up or growing slightly some months those that use Google as a search engine disagree with you. If the search results are as bad as you say, then they would be loosing marketshare. The searchers have voted with their keyboards to prove you wrong.

 

I think any Google marketshare numbers are skewed by mobile results. When you own the mobile operating system and make your own search engine the default search, and make it difficult to change that default, this will happen. It's a classic anti-trust example. That is probably the only thing keeping them from slipping.

Something to consider...since Snowden released details about Google's involvement with Prism, DuckDuckGo's daily searches have quadrupled and continue to grow. I checked a few of the smaller search engines I use periodically, and they have all increased. How is it that everyone's marketshare has increased without Google's slipping? Something to ponder.

 

How do you know that the marketshare of those companies is increasing? The search market is growing, that is why the small engines are getting more! Nothing too do with Snowden!!!

 

The search market did not quadruple after Snowden's leak.

 

Anyone - end user, mobile operators, handset manufacturers and even our grandmothers - is free to change the default search engine and it is very damn easy. I just opened up Chrome on my Android phone, went into the settings and clicked the first one, which happened to be "Search engine". It's now set to Bing. Easy. A few more clicks in the stock browser, but still easily changed to Bing.

There is also more than one mobile operating system. People choose to use Google, Bing, Apple, Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. They are not forced to. It's down to every company if they become popular or not; how well they produce hardware/software and market it. If they adapt to a changing market, innovate, release new products for new demands, etc. Some companies stagnate and fall, such as Blackberry and Nokia, and find it too late when they try to revive themselves.

 

Use of the internet is still increasing, even if 10% of the public stopped using Google tomorrow, the increase in internet access around the world would still probably show a climb.
And lets not forget that we are talking about products here, or at least I was. Google has its own shopping area where it takes a cut of every sale, so this is not about people leaving Google, this is about Google forcing the searcher from organic results into a paid listing service.

Your point does nothing to negate mine. The organic results are increasingly poor (in my opinion) and this is done to assist in migrating surfers to Google shopping, this would not show a reduction in use either, further making your suggestion of use=support being redundant.

 

Or how well they systematically attack and remove all aspects of competition.

Google has dictated the design of websites to inflict rules on advertising to further boost its own advertising network and force webmasters to abandon other advertising options, branded link lists and directories as almost "criminal" because it knew they were a direct threat, dictated rules on linking which further impacted the functionality of their competitors, used subversive methods to gain information without the users consent, and more recently used scaremongering methods to reduce genuine natural linking - something fundamental to the functionality of the internet... I could go on.

Google is not in the position it is simply because people like it. It's in the position it is now in because it took out various forms of competition the moment it had the power to do so. No doubt, in the beginning Google was a breath of fresh air and made things easier for the user, but those days are long gone. When Google started dictating internet standards and forcing webmasters to comply with their demands with threats of loss of business, it became anything but a friendly company in a position of dominance because of public support.