What or who drives Google search?

The venerable New York Times seems to have uncovered a very successful campaign that bolstered JC Penney’s Google results for searches on “cocktail dresses,” “bedding,” and the like by using unsanctioned “black hat” optimization. Corrective “manual” action by Google’s spam cop quickly dampened these results. The author, David Segal, goes on to explain the traffic value of being top search result, ferrets out a web publisher paid to host links for that purpose and interviews a search optimizer who manages surreptitious campaigns to skew results in favor of his clients. It’s all done by attempting to build link structures that Google measures – the who cites whom phenomenon upon which even scholarly rankings are built. The search optimizer differentiates between influencing commercial searches on Google for say, a suit, and more important and less skewed information searches on, say, a cancer condition.  Nonetheless, the sum effect seems to roil and muddy the clarity of Google’s vaunted methods to assure the integrity of search impartiality.  Enough so that the Times wondered aloud about links between Penney’s advertising expenditures with Google and search placement, even as it conveyed Google’s strong denials of any possibility that this might be the case.

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