Commerce and Google

"Commerce and Google" is the title of this entry because Google has a new blog search service that stinks. (A disclaimer: I own Google stock.) Yet, from the evidence, the Google engineers are not as competent as the self-serving reputation they have claimed for themselves.

If you go to the new Google blog search and check out which blogs focus on commerce you will find that this blog site headlined “Commerce” is far down the list. It is not in the first hundred citations and the only blog above it that is concerned with commerce is one of mine.

It is clear that the Google engineers have excluded blog titles from their search. Not smart in my book.

Comments

[Jack Feka]

I ran short of time while I was making the earlier comment and did not explain why I mentioned the listing in Google obtained by Affiliate-master.com (AM).

First, I wanted to point out that AM and "affiliate business" is a slightly less generalized term than "commerce" however, the AM web site has been operating for over 5 years and this is the first time I have ever seen the web site listed highly on Google for any reason in spite of a lot of time effort and expense in trying to improve the ratings.

I, too, felt Google was somehow missing the point because there were so many web sites which were pure junk, in my opinion, in spite of the fact that Affiliate-master.com was possibly the first web site which provided relevant and useful information about the subject.

AM's rating has been improving over time in part because it seems that Google gives some importance to longevity. Another factor which might play a difference in the ranking difference between "commerce" and "affiliate business" is the importance which Google gives to a domain name. In the case of your commerce blog, the domain is blog.com, it might have a decided advantage if the blog were hosted on a website in the "commerce.com" domain or some other domain which had the word "commerce" in its name.

I hope these observations might help in trying to understand the Google enigma.

[Jack Feka]

The ranking of any particular website in Google's search results has long been an enigma and constant challenge for people who are stiving to do business on the internet. It's not surprizing that the search of blogs would be subject to the same type of filtering and processing as other search results.

I'd suspect that the problem in your case would be largely related to the fact that "commerce" is a very broad and general term which could cover a wide number of different areas. This is a dilema which is just as challenging for the searcher as it is for the person who wants to be found.

If you narrow the subject search down, you get much more direct results. For example, I just now performed a search for the phrase "free will and commerce" using the search in quotes, and behold the ONLY result returned was the blog entry you have in this blog with that heading. So this shows that your blog is not necessarily "lost" in the multitude of listing dealing with the topic.

On a side note, my web site deals with Affiliate Businesses, and a search of Google's blogs just now for "Affiliate Business" returned a listing of my blog at the Number one location for related sites together with several listings where this phrase was used, something I was not aware of but was certainly pleased to see.

I suspect that a concept which both searchers and searchees will have to become comfortable in using is that of SIP's (Statistically Improbable Phrases) which I think Amazon initiated. These are phrases which are likely to be found only in certain publications.

For example using the phrase "marital stability verses divorce" will also bring up the blog article which I mentioned above, however using the search phrase with or without being enclosed in quotations produces different results.