Google Books: Cropping up in the weirdest places!

If you’ve been on Google over the last few months, you might have noticed that the traditional text-only results are gradually being salted with other bits and pieces. Videos from YouTube might crop up halfway down the page. If you’re searching using the name of a town, you might see a Google map result. Often, news stories nudge their way in their somewhere. One thing they all have in common is that these results are themselves properties of Google.

Feel free to stroke your chin and say ‘hmmm… interesting’ at this juncture.

Recently, we’ve been doing a bit of preliminary research for a guy looking to rank for ‘plastic glasses’ and sundry other items common to the Great British Party Buffet. The first stop is to bob onto Google, have a poke around to get a feel for the competition.

The first page? No surprises – mainly people selling plastic glasses, would you believe it, although even so there were 2 news stories about plastic glasses. But from page 2 onwards a weird pattern arose. In the top 40 results, there were no less than 6 results from Google books. Queer, no? Or to put it another way 1 in 5 results! (In case you’re unfamiliar with Google Books, they are basically digital copies of out-of-copyright books or scanned excerpts from new books).

Google are using their muscle to push their own products into the rankings wherever possible. Why? Because the fewer ‘commercial’ results that appear in the top 10, the bigger the market for selling AdWords gets. That’s the reason Google are snuggled up in bed with Wikipedia, The BBC and almost any page – no matter how out of date or irrelevant – from a university or government department. If a top 10 search yielded nothing but academic research and news stories that means anyone wanting to rank on Google has to pay them. Ker-ching!

These result suggests to me that Google are starting to sail a bit close to the wind. The chances of someone searching for “plastic glasses” being motivated by a desire to read a book where plastic glasses are mentioned or a recipe which calls for a plastic glass are pretty slight.

Why does this matter to Google? Because these makes their results irrelevant to the searcher. And Google’s market position, indominatable as it looks from here, is based solely on having the most relevant results. It might be an aberration, but every tweak Google makes to give ever more weight

To compare, I nipped over to Yahoo. Nothing spurious there – just people selling plastic glasses. Where would I go tomorrow for my results? Probably Google. But that’s a pretty big ‘probably’ for a company with no obvious lock-in other than market reputation to be playing footsy with.

Today’s Moral

Is it as bad an in-your-face as spam? No. But Google’s seemingly never-ending march towards ‘non commercial’ results represents a very real risk for the company. If a search for a product shows up nothing but Wikipedia articles, news stories and 18th century ‘how to’ guides then you might think about going elsewhere for your results. Remember: names like Altavista and Lycos once thought they had the lock in on search. It’s hard to see Google falling into the same trap, but somewhere in a shed some bright spark is rethinking how to monetise search and in technology times move pretty fast…