Can Google Stop Global Warming?
In between our SEO and PPC discussions, we were having a discussion about global warming at work. As expected, some believed global warming was caused by people and others felt it was a natural cycle of the earth.
I searched global warming in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Comparing the top 10 results, it appeared most of MSN’s results had sites for the natural cycle theory, Yahoo was a mix of both, but Google was mostly sites with information on how people were causing global warming.
Many questions came up when I noticed this.
- Did Google do this on purpose or did these results appear solely based on their normal algorithms?
- What would the outcome be if Google manipulated the results one way more than the other? In other words, will the search results for global warming change anyone’s feelings on global warming to the extent that it would make them change their mind one way or the other?
- If these results would make people change their minds, where else can SEO be used to affect outcomes of other issues? What would happen if someone searched for “democrats” and the top 10 results were sites related to things like why Democrat ideas are wrong and why you should vote Republican? How about search for Coke and get Pepsi results, Toyota - Honda, etc…
2 Comments:
A very well thought out blog, I'm a student of marketing and design and i do some web design work on the side, as as you can guess everyone wants their sites highest on Google's lists, through meta tags, and in some cases paying Google to move it up their lists, I had never thought that perhaps they reconstructed their lists for their own subliminal purposes, but i suppose the same things could be paid for as well, especially with the searching for Coke and finding Pepsi theory. however Google has a policy that if the meta tag doesn't match the content they will wipe it clean from their lists, so going that far would probably be out of the question. but giving selective answers to a question within reason, that's quite interesting and will probably help me to help my clients better. Cheers
"giving selective answers to a question within reason, that's quite interesting"
The scary thing is that this would be pretty easy to do. Let's say you dislike someone named "bob widgets." It wouldnt take much to buy several "bob widgets" domains, create some bob widgets pages on a site, get a good number of quality back links, etc... and put content, with your opinion, about bob widgets.
Someone searches for "bob widgets" your sites/pages come up. Now replace "bob widgets" with political candidates, religious beliefs, products, services, etc..
It takes reputation monitoring to a new level.
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