Twitter was abuzz last night with links to David Segal's amazing NYTimes yarn of a bad internet actor who says he uses -- and eggs on -- customer complaints to get more links and mentions online, thus more Googlejuice, thus more business.
The Times didn't go the next step to ask what Google should do about this. And Google didn't help itself by dispatching only an unnamed spokesperson who then, Segal complains, didn't send a followup email. Google would have been much wiser to have hooked Segal up with Matt Cutts, the company's wizard in the game of bad-guy whack-a-mole, to discuss the options and implications.
It's not as simple as it seems, for Google and its algorithms are now a set of laws of the web and if you intervene in one way, you may trigger the law of unintended consequences in another.
What if Google sensed the positive or negative sentiment in links and used that to guide its placement in search, as some suggested? Makes sense in the case of bad-guy Borker and his virtual eyeglass store. But as someone pointed out on Twitter last night: If Google did let sentiment affect rank, then what would it do with the negative links regarding Barack Obama or Sarah Palin, to Islam or GM? How would you write that law, remembering that the code is the law?
What if instead Google intervened in a case such as this and, seeing all the complaints, manually downgraded the guy in search? The first problem with that is scale: how do you find and investigate all the bad guys? The bigger problem is whether we want Google to be the cop of the world. Google has been sued by companies it decreed were link-bating spammer sites, downgrading them in search, while the sites said they were legitimate directories. This is the one case in which Google holds the power of God in a market and it's a dangerous position to be in.
I have suggested before that Google should set up a jury of peers to adjudicate such cases. I didn't use the verb "crowdsource," for crowds can be gamed, as Mr. Borker amply demonstrates. But a trusted (cue Craig Newmark) jury could give Google distance from the decision. I say peers -- fellow business people -- because in cases such as this, their interests and those of Google and us, the users, are aligned: We don't want bad guys to game search. Google, especially, wants to -- in Cutts' words -- find more signals of quality and originality so its results are of higher quality and relevance.
What I'm really saying is that as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other private players come to be the law of the land on the internet, they need to start acting like public players with Constitutions and Bills of Rights and the means of enforcement and adjudication with due process. I'll be exploring this notion in Public Parts.
In the end, Segal's story looks like a failure of search, Google, and the internet. The internet made it possible for a bad guy to win. Well, so does Wall Street.
But I don't think this was Google's failure (cue fan-boy accusations). The moral of the story should be that if you search Google for the name of Borker's company, you see plenty of loud complaints in the results. The internet doesn't nullify the First Law of Commerce: caveat emptor. When I had my now-legendary problems with Dell, I kicked myself for not doing a search of "dell sucks" before buying my computer. That's my responsibility as a shopper. And, as I pointed out at the time, Google would have given me the information I needed. Ditto for the lady in Segal's story. If I think of buying from a new vendor, I've learned my lesson: I search Google first because fellow customers, using Google, will help protect me.
That is the lesson The Times should have given its readers: Use Google to guard against those who would use Google.