John Lindal’s Blog

Google

My simmering indigestion from the articles about Google by Coding Horror and Whimsley caused me to burp up the thought that Google might actually be adjusting their search results to optimize revenue. I posted a quick comment on Coding Horror and wasn’t planning to mull it over any further, but then I realized that Google must be doing this. The only question is: To what extent?

If a site is displayed in the paid section, it is actually quite reasonable that Google does not show that site in the unpaid section. But what if moving a particular unpaid result to page 2 increases the number of clicks on the paid results? Almost nobody bothers to view page 2 of the results, so the result effectively ceases to exist! Even moving a result to the bottom of page 1 would have a huge impact, since many people probably don’t even bother to scroll down.

It would be easy for Google to do this kind of optimization. They have so much traffic that they could bucket test small fractions to look for significant increases in CTR without anybody noticing. So from the outside, this seems impossible to prove. Google is a black box, so who can say whether a particular result belongs on page 1 or page 2? But the thought that a particular site might effectively cease to exist in order to satisfy Google’s hunger for profit is pretty scary…

Update (2/18/10): I just noticed that Google does not filter out sites from the unpaid section if they are listed in the paid section.