"You don't want to give the game away," said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, an industry newsletter. "At the same time, your lack of talking causes people to mistrust you. Perhaps it's the culture of search -- you've got these enemies all around you."
Google pokes fun at its own evasiveness. A Google search for "How does Google work?" delivers, as the first result, a link to a website explaining that results are delivered by a cluster of birds working together in a system called PigeonRank. The page was created by a Google employee as an April Fools' Day gag in 2002.
The ranking method is no joke for the thousands of businesses that depend on Google for the flood of traffic that a top search result delivers. Companies have found their websites dropped from the results without explanation, and it can take months to get back into Google's good graces.
Google publishes a list of guidelines "for maintaining a Google-friendly website," warning against such tactics as loading Web pages with irrelevant words or hidden text to try to artificially boost search rankings. It also periodically changes the way it ranks sites, to counteract more sophisticated tactics in the cat-and-mouse game with "search engine optimizers." Whenever it does, online message boards fill with complaints from webmasters saying their sites got the "Google death penalty."
A few dropped companies have sued Google to no avail, including a website operator who argued that his business had been hurt when Google dropped his sites. An Oklahoma federal judge dismissed that case in 2003, saying Google's rankings amounted to a constitutionally protected expression of opinion.
Advertisers who pay to appear in "sponsored links" alongside the regular search results also have felt the frustration.
Search advertising is praised as a cost-effective way to reach consumers when they have something specific on their minds. It's also maddeningly complex. Unlike Yellow Pages or newspapers, many marketers have little clue when or where their ads will appear. That's because Google's system is a dynamic auction. Advertisers bid for placement, but price is only one factor in ranking the ads. Google also uses "click-through-rate" -- if ads aren't clicked on much, they will be replaced by others that are. Searchers are more likely to be interested in those ads, which helps marketers sell products and Google get paid.
