I didn’t see anything about Google taking popularity into account at all. However, they could. They have a lot of this data from sites running analytics.

I think the opening argument about Google’s growing dominance misses the mark. Just because something is getting more popular, it doesn’t mean that the product is getting better – or even that it’s a good product. Perhaps the growth of Chrome is leading to the increased traffic.

People aren’t defecting because there’s really not a great place to defect to. It seems like Bing is the only viable option. (Yahoo search results will be Bing at some point, so I’m discounting that).

As for the library vs. the bookstore argument, everyone knows that the first page of the Google results is a best seller’s rack. I don’t think that a bad thing. If you do think it’s a bad thing, what would you do to fix it? Should Google just present hits in random order or alphabetical by author? That’s not very helpful to me. I much prefer the Amazon method of being able to sort on customer reviews or best selling.

I don’t think Google got bullied. The arguments that were made about the content farms creeping up in results can be objectively seen and measured.

Finally, Google has been working on this for over a year – before anyone was complaining. They used an algorithm to create what seems to be better results. This matches with the data that they are getting from Chrome users. I don’t see how this is different than any other algorithm change they’ve made to improve their search results. I’d be much more nervous if they were using the Chrome data directly as you could vote down your competitors.

Maybe it’s a quality of Toronto libraries, but they’re, thankfully, not that neutral. The rack at the front almost never has ‘popular’ fiction on it. No Grisham, no Danielle Steel, no Robert Jordan, none of that stuff, let alone a lot of the junk that never makes it into libraries to begin with. They put quality resources up front, and bury the other stuff behind it for you to find if you want to go looking. Librarians make assumptions that I am looking for the most accurate, most reputable, best peer reviewed resource to answer my question, an assumption I’m glad to have them make.

It sounds like your experience with this change suggests that Google has a long way to go if their goal is to bring the most accurate, most specialized and most reputable resource to the top (and it’s interesting that in some ways I guess in talking about librarians I’m talking like the old Yahoo model of handbuilding search results, hmm… further consideration necessary). But I think this step is one in the right direction and places the focus of search squarely where it should be.

Love the “steal content, get banned” proposal. We need to return to an understanding of why the hell we created hyperlinks to begin with-connect people to the original source rather than copying it.

More Geocities style content will surely make me weep, so I hope that that finding is an aberration that will be remedied. As HTML5 and more semantic content comes into place, those headings and hierarchies will be better understood by the robots I expect and those with proper information hierarchies will be rewarded.

Thankfully, with Readability I can pay the pennies per page view (though people gaming a ppv system with unnecessary links to generate pageviews will piss me off something fierce). It’s actually the part that I don’t understand about those sites-why haven’t more content sites simply blocked them, since I’m no longer seeing the ads that pay for the content and instead paying Instapaper for the app to block them. Of course, Google’s Mobilizer does pretty much the same thing. It’s an odd omission in the litigious world that I can, to draw an analogy, cut an article out of your magazine (without paying for it) and sell the opportunity to read it to someone else.

Well, and I have the adblockers running pretty well too for that matter, so I’m not really paying ad heavy pages anyway. As a note, I don’t block ads on sites where the ads are actually for things I might be interested in. Curated ads for a narrow audience outperform all of the automated systems if you’re trying to get me to buy something.

Google alerts is completely broken thanks to the content farms. Any step in the right direction is better than nothing.

I’d love if Google became librarians, but that’s not what I’m seeing. A library has everything available and lets the user find the content they desire. Libraries are generally neutral. Google acts far more like a bookstore, with that first page of results akin to the ‘best sellers’ rack at the front of the store. Google also papers the sides of those racks with ads, and it’s not for the local school bake sale.

Again, I’m all for penalizing sites that scrape, copy and steal content. I’m a cycling fan so I like harsh penalties. Get caught copying content, you’re out of the index for a year.

The readability of content is an interesting topic. I’m actually a big proponent of less being more. That creating readable content is vital to SEO. UX and (good) SEO are very close together in my mind. What I’m seeing ranking high doesn’t quite match that goal.

I’m seeing things that remind me of geocities. There’s no font hierarchy. Instead it’s long blocks of content that I have to think will chase users away. I’m seeing more ads, not less, and I’m seeing them in truly obnoxious places. In one instance a site that jumped one of my clients for a term has no content above the fold but instead has a massive AdSense unit.

So I think we’re in agreement that sites that allow the reader to better engage with the content should be rewarded. I just don’t think this Farmer Update did that.

There’s also an interesting discussion to be had on how sites can support themselves. By tuning out and turning off the advertising, we make it harder for those sites to stay in business. Would you pay pennies per page view to content creators so they could continue to publish without intrusive ads?

The no-style version of the web is gaining popularity with everybody I know, and should be rewarded. I read everything through the filter of Reeder, Readability, and Instapaper, because the overwhelming majority of sites are full of images and text designed to distract me from the actual content I want to read/watch, etc. I for one am very glad to see them penalizing sites that don’t make their focus the easy consumption of the primary page content.

The idea that targeted content alone can rank highly just isn’t true. So, I see this change as attacking the symptom of the problem and not the cause. Unfortunately, like a lot of medicine, it kills a lot of good things as it tries to kill the bad.

Finally, I’m concerned that Google is becoming a nanny search engine. They’ve decided that certain content isn’t good for us, even if it was popular. I think that’s a dangerous precedent.

Googles actions are probably related to a critical mass of “business” popping up offering this service churning out over time adds up to over 10% of search results. Now they will have to work harder.

Shouldn’t you have to earn your rank by posting REAL comments on interesting sites