Google Spanks J.C. Penney For Advertising Violations

[Jordi]

Ok so now we've seen the power of Google to nerf a company's listing positions.... I can certainly see this power being used for evil. Perhaps blackmail?

The problem I have with this situation is that basically Google has shown that it can and will manually manipulate searches.

I sense very dark times ahead for internet neutrality -- when Google pushes their own agenda to the top of searches, and anything that Google doesn't like gets pushed to the bottom. Example: someone doing a search for 'e-mail addresses' gets Gmail ads pushed to the top while Yahoo!, AOL, Windows Live / MSN / Hotmail, et al get pushed to the bottom.

I want to defend Google here. Yes, Google is immensely powerful. And any power can be abused for evil. But that doesn't mean that they will do that. In fact, I think that Google has been pretty benevolent throughout the years. (I don't even think their China policy was particularly evil. Any company operating in China has to comply with Chinese law. They did that, and later they reconsidered. Unlike a lot of companies.)

I also think that Google very much dislikes having to take a manual action. Their goal is to present the most relevant search results for every search term. They made an algorithm that they think best accomplishes this in a way that is fairly neutral. However, unfortunately it only works when people don't try to exploit it. When that happens, the algorithm stops properly working and manual action is required. If they don't do that, it is even worse for internet neutrality, because then the top search results will be dominated by the companies with the deepest pockets, instead of the most relevant ones.
Note also that even though this is J.C. Penny's fourth(!) offense, they haven't been dropped from the search results. I think that is because maybe Google wasn't trying to punish them so much as restore them to the position they would have had if they hadn't cheated. They want the order to be "correct".

Also, I believe the research you are citing was deeply flawed. Google's top result for e-mail is "Gmail", Yahoo's is "Yahoo" and Bing's is "Hotmail". That doesn't mean they have manually manipulated the results. In fact, it seems very intuitive to me, as each search engine is trying to serve its users best. It seems very likely to me that Google users are more inclined to use Gmail, while MS users are more inclined to use Hotmail. If I go to a company's website and I type in "email" I expect to get their e-mail service!