The German high command lived in fear of a two front war throughout the 20th century. Landlocked between two military powers, they knew that it would be impossible to sustain a war effort in the East and the West for any length of time. Hitler proved the point spectacularly by invading Russia before defeating Britain. Naturally, the death knell rang for Nazi Germany when the allies landed in France.
I raise this point, because Google has just opened a new front for itself. As well as trying to fight organic spam, it will now find itself fighting a war against the distributed wit of people using blogs, news aggregators and Twitter. The reason? Real time search.
Can you trust real time?
At the heart of Google’s algorithm is, we are told, trust. Millions of pounds have been spent trying to back-engineer what Google’s idea of trustworthiness is and build sites and content that fit that criteria. We read almost daily about why we use Google… because we trust its results.
And then Google lobs in “real time search”. I don’t think ‘clusterf**k’ is too strong a word for it.
How does an unsourced, essentially anonymous tweet fit into this carefully constructed idea of ‘trust’? Let’s have a look at Tiger Woods. As you can imagine, the internet is full of gags, rumour, racism, conspiracy theories and the rest.
Now, I don’t know. Maybe GaryCaldwell5 has been shagging Tiger Woods’ wife behind his back, but this is what Google real time allows: unmediated, unverified bilge to seep through onto its first page SERPs. Can I hop on this trend? Why not….
(In your face, Gary Caldwell)
Now I Tweeted (much to the consternation of my 148 – count ‘em! – followers) that “Tiger Woods is a paedophile” and that never showed up, so it looks like there’s some words that Google is filtering out but it’s a crude tool. A couple of minutes later, I Tweeted this, which went through fine:
I included a link to what I (stupidly!) thought might be a fake domain “tigerwoodsnews.com/shock-news”. Google went to the trouble to visit that URL, make sure it worked, get the title and domain name from the live page and drop it into their results. So I spammed Google for a first page slot for a porn site with no real effort at all.
“But hey! That result is there and gone in the space of a minute or two,” I hear you cry. But so what? I can have a hundred Twitter accounts retweeting all day if I want to. Getting even a fraction of the current Tiger Woods traffic is probably more than worth the effort of a few dozen Twitter accounts if I’m dropping affiliate clicks someplace.
So now you can begin to see the outlines of a spam strategy for traffic. Stay logged onto the news sites to see what’s happening. Title a post on your target site with something relevant and provocative (even though you’re actually doing an affiliate sale) and Tweet it out with a Bit.ly link. Google indexes that with the title you specified and it drops into real time results. Now just start opening your various Twitter accounts and tweeting and retweeting between them. If you’re any sort of scammer you can set this stuff up easily or rely on a network of tweeters to help you out. As the news carries on reverberating through the day, you’ll pick up traffic.
If you invest a little bit more in your content, you can probably even start to pick up legitimate retweets as a result of your listing. Remember that post about SEO I made a week or two ago? That went first page for ‘SEO‘ for a couple of days, purely because people retweeted it and it made it onto Tweetmeme. And that perpetuated it. If you’re smart and have resources, you can use all of that to potentially go first page organically – even if it isn’t defensible in the long run.
Privacy?
Twitter is obviously a pretty unmediated space. I just claimed that I shagged Tiger Woods’ wife. If I do that down the pub, I do so in front of 5 people who know me and are probably beered up. They laugh and that’s as far as it goes. I do it on Twitter and up to now only my social circle got to see it. Now for all I know, 20,000 people saw me make that claim just now thanks to real time search. Is that crossing some kind of line in terms of privacy?
Do I even have privacy now that Google have decided to share my results with pretty much everybody? I know there’s some kind of setting on Twitter to control it, but that’s me and it’s my job to know. Will some guy from down the pub realise?
Apparently not.
It’s inaccurate anyway…
If you search for ‘Dave Naylor’, Google Suggests suggests ‘dave naylor twitter’. The first organic listing is, as you might expect, Dave’s Twitter account. But ahead of that we get this…
Clearly the main algorithm isn’t talking the same language as the real time stuff – and that’s a major worry. What efforts do I have to go to to highjack some brand’s real time traffic? I don’t know, I haven’t tested. Be sure that someone else is though, and if it’s your brand they’re testing against… well you do the maths.
The two front war
Keeping the organic SERPs spam-free is a Sisyphean task already. You and I both know what you can get away on the very borderlines of spam – even in competitive verticals. Move out to the niches and you can still see stuff that is – for all intents and purposes – spam as your grandad knew it. Google have made a better fist of tackling this than any previous leader in the search market but the exploits are still there, and if the margins on a product are worth the effort then people are going to pursue them.
Now that’s for an infrastructure that is has been mature for about a decade, with a corresponding amount of effort and time invested in it. And even before they’ve totally expurgated that landscape of spam, Google are trying to take on an infrastructure that is unproven and unpoliced. Until things like Twitter are mature enough to deal with their own problems, Google should stay well away.
To go back to the WWII analogy, could this be Google’s Stalingrad? For all the problems, it’s unlikely – Google’s lead is just too great and they can drop the feature if it becomes too troublesome. But it is perhaps the first hint of real hubris at Google… and hubris is always followed by nemesis.
24 Comments
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It seems like Google was in a hurry when they did the Twitter integration. How come the also place these tweets above the normal search results? I don’t believe many tweets are a better result than the #1 in the normal search results.
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Excellent write up. The results are an absolute joke and discredit Google’s reputation for relevant results. Seems like a knee jerk reaction to Twitters growing audience.
- 4
It always amazes me how freely you Brits use the n-word. It’s 100%-completely-no-exceptions forbidden for any white Americans to even quote it in writing over here. If I put that graphic on my blog I would most definitely be fired. I’m not condemning you, just pointing out our differences. Cheers!
- 5
Well, if we are working with a WWII analogy here, what has just happened is the Kiev Pocket. On the surface a spectacularly successful operation, netting around 600,000 prisoners and destroying an entire Front, it also delayed the drive on Moscow by a crucial 3 or so weeks, leading to the drive on Moscow petering out within sight of the Kremlin, and ultimately costing the Axis the war.
It might look good now, but the long term effects may be devastating. If I was Google, I would be really worried that SEOs think this is an exciting time. We might bitch about having to learn about new stuff, and change how we work, and update our knowledge, but we improve exponentially, Google only improve incrementally.
And, seriously, if my brain has malfunctioned, so I want to see what is happening on Twitter, I can just go to Twitter. Why the HELL do I have to put up with it in natural results?
- 6
The WWII reference is very apropos, how will Google ‘quantify’ trust with spam? It seems that Google did push it out too fast (hat tip to Martin LeBlanc) and wanted to show off that they can do Real Time.
I think they will need to get a handle on this before it gets out of hand and blows up in their face. IMHO!!
Great blog, BTW.
- 7
I’m not really sure how I feel about the real-time results.
I definitely feel that there should be an option to disable it completely, but I’d rather allow it to get more granular where I could select the sources. For one, I would remove twitter, Facebook, probably Wikipedia and any other publicly editable source where the submissions are likely to be junk. I would leave enabled authoritative news site like BBC, NYT, etc. Sometimes I leave a SERP open in one tab and come back to it later. It would be cool to automatically see the news results and be able to scroll through them… but I want it to be authoritative stuff; not twitter status updates.
But all-in-all, I don’t generally use Google for real-time stuff. But, that’s obviously part of what they’re trying to change.
- 8
There’s a pretty obvious algorithmic solution to twitter spam based on followers, and the quality of those followers– my bet is that in a few weeks we will see a new way of ranking tweets for real time search.
- 9
I enjoyed this post and some of the comments. I feel, too, that Google has made a rather big blunder. There are better ways though but for that you need to invest in building some rather sophisticated technology first. I prefer to use TipTop http://FeelTipTop.com to get sensible results from searches of social media. This search engine goes the extra step of actually reading and understanding the messages. It is not just keyword match.
- 10
[...] spammers and black hats are having a field day in the UK organic search listings (never mind real time search) and it’s nearly [...]
- 11
The sooner Google remove their stupid “News” box and it’s scrolling annoyance from search results, or at least give us the option to do so the better imho!
I use “News” in a very loose sense, much the same way Google seem to have LOL.
- 12
I don’t think Google will be too happy about you likening them to Nazi Germany… But that aside it is a great analogy and this is a really well written blog post. You do raise some strong and interesting points about Real Time Search, and the spam potential. I guess once the spammers take hold Google will drop the real time search like a lead balloon, especially if people find them less than useful (which they pretty much are already IMO).
- 13
I think after integrated with Twitter, Google now a day was updating information to first. Google will review very soon about such type of topic.
- 14
After reading this post. and hearing lots of talk in the office about RTS i’ve just spent a bit of time having a dig around .. and I just don’t get it. Why on earth when I search for something do I want to see a random stranger’s tweet about what I have searched for. Talk about giving me results from a totally untrusted source that could be totally off topic. I don’t mind the feed bringing in the latest from news / magazine sources but please not from Twitter.
- 15
Great post. Google are going to have to do something sharpish to clean up these results.
Another issue is reputation management for brands. Real time results occupying the number one spot for ‘SEOmoz & BA as I write. Some spammer tweets…. ‘SEOmoz gave me crap service… use XSEOCOMPANY.COM, they’re much better’….. and that get’s to number one, not only is that a pain for SEOmoz, but how is that giving the searcher the best experience?
- 16
Thanks, a really interesting post; and the issue of spamming real time results through the social media platforms is something a colleague and I have been also discussing. Does Google really need to worry about it since Twitter does stop people RTing the same message(s) on the same account. They also pick up on spam accounts pretty quickly. but perhaps it will be a problem and as some have already commented, live search won’t be with us for long as 2010 unfolds. Definitely exciting times . . . .
- 17
[...] but in this case, I think it’s seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search enthusiast, agrees) their usability and [...]
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[...] Google real time search: flawed to hell | David Naylor "Twitter is obviously a pretty unmediated space. I just claimed that I shagged Tiger Woods’ wife. If I do that down the pub, I do so in front of 5 people who know me and are probably beered up. They laugh and that’s as far as it goes. I do it on Twitter and up to now only my social circle got to see it. Now for all I know, 20,000 people saw me make that claim just now thanks to real time search. Is that crossing some kind of line in terms of privacy?" (tags: twitter google realtimesearch realtimeweb spam privacy) [...]
- 19
[...] but in this case, I think it’s seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search enthusiast, agrees) their usability and [...]
- 20
I don’t like the new Google — the good old “10 blue links” was much better.
- 21
[...] and Facebook to show up in your respective search results. However, I wasn’t surprise to see some questionable results in the early [...]
- 22
[...] and Facebook to show up in your respective search results. However, I wasn’t surprise to see some questionable results in the early [...]
- 23
[...] Google is now displaying Twitter in its search results. The way it’s doing it certainly is a bit of an issue and opens up the results to manipulation. Google also rolled out several new AdWord units just in [...]
- 24
[...] but in this case, I think it’s seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search enthusiast, agrees) their usability and [...]
First, really like the WWII analogy – great way to relate the issue. Second, I can only imagine how many people are working on bots or other automated tools… “just add your keyword phrase here and XYZ will automatically randomize Tweets from using your keyword phrase…”