The Myth of Good Content Rising to the Top

Media pundits are always raving about Google’s search algorithms, claiming that they bring the cream of the content crop to the top and without bias, since computers do the work and not human beings. But human beings create the algorithms that run these computers, and algorithms are always created based on the programmer’s assumptions. And assumptions can be right or wrong, fair or unfair. In the case of Google Search, the chief algorithmic assumption seems to be that good content will necessarily acquire a variety of incoming links.

But this is a false assumption. Why? Because online content has to be seen first by a relevant audience before it can acquire incoming links. And Google’s algorithms make no provision for letting a site simply be seen in order to acquire those links. Instead, Google expects the content producer either to pay for having his or her content seen via Google Ads or to have preexisting friends and/or contacts who will link to said content as a matter of course. In other words, Google’s method for ranking sites is not based on the quality of the content, but on the social connections of the author who created it. Only THEN does it begin concerning itself with quality as judged through links. If you have no online social connections and you’re not paying Google for visibility, you could publish the modern version of War and Peace and you would get zero hits — not because the content sucks but because Google’s algorithms will ensure that literally no one will see it in search results, let alone the audience that might be supposed to have an interest in such content.

I published a cartoon music video featuring my keyboard rendition of “12 Days of Christmas” on YouTube about ten years ago, and it received exactly zero hits for the first year that it was online. Zero. I am only now beginning to get likes for this song that I posted an entire decade a go, not because the song sucks, but because the song gets almost zero hits per year. Yet Google seems to be taking these zero hits as proof that the song sucks and this makes no sense at all. The song only has zero hits because Google’s search engines have made it invisible online and so no one can hear it in order to judge it one way or another. It’s a big world out there and surely some music lover would love to hear every single version of that song, good or bad, at least once. But based on my song’s horrible performance in search results, either no such passionate music lovers exist (which is hard to believe) or Google has simply made the song “unfindable” for the average surfer.

Then there’s my website, an admittedly controversial site called AbolishTheDEA.com. Unless I republish that site’s articles on Reddit (with a link back to my anti-drug-war domain) I get zero organic links from Google. Zero. And I know this because I monitor my stats daily. And this search engine stonewalling has lasted since the site debuted two years ago. We’re talking about a website that has over 100 philosophical essays, many with deliberately provocative titles such as “There is No Drug Problem,” “Addicted to Addiction,” and “How the Drug War Killed the Peaceful Rave Scene.” I republished that latter piece on Medium.com three weeks ago and it has zero hits there as well so far. (That’s not a surprise, though, since Medium.com boasts that it uses the same search engine strategy as Google.com, apparently convinced that that’s a good thing.)

Again, we have to ask: How can site content rise to the top if no one sees it?

It wasn’t always like this, of course. The year before Google went commercial, I could publish a controversial article on my own domain and hear back that same day from someone somewhere who proved to be deeply interested in the topics that I had broached. The same day! I’m told that Google deliberately prevents such visibility today by placing all new content (at least when created by insufficiently social authors like myself) in a so-called “sand box,” where it can be segregated from the real Web until such time as Google’s algorithms are feeling generous, say in a decade or so?

Conclusion: It’s all well and good to judge sites based on the quantity and quality of the incoming links that they acquire — but this algorithmic criterion only makes sense if we assume that the sites in question are being given a modicum of visibility by Google in the first place. If not, then Google search results often have as much to do with the social connections of the content publisher as they do with the quality of what they publish.

But perhaps a for-profit search engine simply cannot produce fair results. I remember a university paper that made that very point just over 20 years ago, just before Google became for-profit in a big way: The authors said, and I quote from memory… “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” The paper was entitled “The Anatomy of a Search Engine,” as I recall. It was written by two computer geeks at Stanford University. Let’s see now, what were their names…? Oh, yes, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.