Search Engine Marketing Ethics: Don’t Be Evil
“Don’t be evil,” sounds like a command given to a sinister three-year-old boy eyeing a batch of freshly baked cookies by a mother as she leaves the kitchen to rip a butt. In an age when we have more embezzling CEOs than roll models it is hard to imagine a new, headline making company using this as a their informal mantra.
Being a buzz worthy company that has recently become public, it’s informal mantra has become a lightning rod for both positive and negative attention from the press and self acclaimed “internet gurus.” Entire websites have been devoted to the monitoring and belittling of the world’s most popular search engine. Two sites that were easy to find in the Google search results were www.google-watch.org and www.dontbeevil.com.
While skimming across some extremist’s articles I read the heading, “Noncommercial links get buried.” This was a little distressing to me, as I seem to have found myself heading down a SEM career path. I began to ask myself, does it only take a couple of bucks to get at the top of the SERP? As it turns out, the author sits on the board of the Independent Press Association. These are the sorts of credentials that make my liberally educated curiosity perk.
The author took a phrase, “troubled teen,” and did a poll of the results. The author claimed that all the top results were commercial sites that suggested expensive boarding schools, boot camps and wilderness excursions. After attending four years liberal arts classes with lesbian, hybrid driving, Nadar voting Professors, I was ready to believe anything. With only a few minutes of comparing search results on Google, MSN and Yahoo! I found that all three sites had similar non-sponsored results. In fact, the top ten ranking sites of all three engines seemed to suggest sending your child away to a pricey residential treatment center (RTC). Perhaps that is the best way to rid yourself of your troubled teen.
If you were to specify your search on google to “troubled teen support Boston” you would find that only three of the top ten suggested RTCs, while four pointed you in the direction of local help groups and websites on eating disorders and other issues for troubled teens. One of the results was a link to a movie on troubled teens and the final was a wildcard on extra terrestrial life. It would seem to me that our author should spend more time with their kids and not worry about algorithmic conspiracies to favor commercial sites.
When considering Google’s reactions to government’s requests we can only see how “don’t be evil” has gathered more attention. In China Google did remove some content in order to abide by Chinese regulations. This is also done in France, Germany and the United States. Google said it would report to Chinese users where content had been blocked, this is a step further than MSN and Yahoo! went. Although it is discouraging to see information limited to the people to China, we can’t expect corporations to preach Americanism overseas in a way that may affect foreign affairs.
As a conclusion we must remember that everything is relative to our own experiences, and that other people, cultures and governments will have their own method of enframing. Evil is always going to be in the eye of the beholder. Secondly, just because a company seems to think that “Don’t be evil,” is an appropriate informal mantra for their code of conduct doesn’t mean we should point our fingers at them and use them as a scapegoat for moral corruption in large corporations. We should have faith a little more faith in humanity.