Searching for information = searching for advertisements?
A friend of the reporter wanted to travel to Beijing during the National Day. He entered the keyword "Beijing travel" into a search engine. The first twenty search results were all advertisements from some travel companies, which scared his friend. A jump.
A more serious problem lies behind. Lao Wang, a native of Sichuan, suffered from prostatitis. He searched for the disease on a certain search engine, and the one at the top of the search list was a hospital called "General Staff Headquarters." Lao Wang thought, search engine recommendations should be fair and objective, right? But after spending more than 10,000 yuan, the disease became more and more serious. Lao Wang didn't know that he had fallen into the trap of false medical advertising - the ads were paid to be posted on search engine websites, and the search engines "took" patients to find them.
"Are search engines still considering the feelings of our users? Why are there always advertisements that appear on the front search page, while the information our users really need is drowned in them?" In the past half month, many users have asked and readers asked reporters such questions.
Our reporter’s investigation found that when searching for pages on hotels, hotels, travel, mobile phones, computers, medical care, education, gifts, liquor, heart disease, etc., a large number of advertisers and agents flooded the pages. Greatly limits the user's search results.
"Find it, find it quickly, find it accurately" is the unwritten standard for a good search engine by users and the industry, and it is also the "user experience" that affects the key indicators of search engines. In the book "The World is Flat", Friedman analyzed the "10 major driving forces that flatten the world". Among them, the emergence of search engines was particularly praised because search engines allow people to find information, products and services more quickly. ... However, judging from the current situation of "cannot find, find slowly, and find inaccurately", this writer who is highly regarded by countless people has obviously made a miscalculation in the Chinese search engine market.
Is Friedman suspected of "talking lightly"? In fact, Friedman's search engine speculation is based on certain institutional foundations, ethical environment and business principles. In this writer's opinion, these are the basic and self-evident premises of search engines.
However, looking around China's search engines, these basic premises have been widely questioned. Is this a natural flaw of search engines or driven by commercial interests? Why do search engines take this in stride?
The commercialization of search engines is rampant
A secret meeting revealed the tip of the iceberg of the inside story of China's search engines.
On September 23 and 24, 2008, during the China Internet Conference, giants from various search engines gathered together and quietly held a search engine conference. The theme of this conference is: SEO in the era of search engine marketing.
The so-called SEO, namely Search Engine Optimization, can also be called "search engine optimization". This is a way to use the search rules of search engines to improve the ranking of the target website in the relevant search engines - through content selection and arrangement, keyword distribution, increasing internal links and backlinks, and even bidding rankings and other means. , to improve the ranking of the searched website on major search engines in a targeted manner.
"We discussed how SEO and advertising can better penetrate into every corner of the search engine." A participant told reporters after the meeting.
This conveys a message: Search engines are seeking more business models, or in other words, optimizing the current business model to achieve more business benefits.
“Unlike foreign search engines that generally adopt a direct sales model, domestic search engines use a large number of free search experiences to attract attention and traffic, and then mainly use agency advertising models to launch bidding rankings or advertising. Profit model." Dong Haiping, head of the China Anti-Rogue Software Alliance, believes that the business model of China's search engines is not a secret.
Statistics from a domestic consulting company show that among the many search results provided by search engines, users who browse the first three pages account for 98% of all users. Only 2% of users will read the content after the third page. The first 5 items on the first page are the most valuable positions on the search page.
Does this mean that searches that rank high or on the first page are trustworthy or recommended? The answer is no.
To a certain extent, high search rankings are the best manifestation of search engine commercialization - in order to compete for this position, many advertisers spend money on search engines to "beat their heads". This means that after excessive commercialization, it is difficult for search engines to get rid of the embarrassing disadvantages of misleading netizens' choices.
From September 20th to 25th, our reporter randomly surveyed 50 users. When asked "whether search engines are too commercial", 70% of the answers were yes, for the following reasons: Many search results are entirely ads.
"Misunderstanding, misunderstanding." During the investigation by this reporter, relevant people from search companies such as Baidu and Google said this repeatedly, and they were unwilling to talk more about whether the commercialization of their search engines was rampant.
Liu Jianguo, former CEO of Baidu and now president of Aibang.com, once revealed that the bidding ranking on the homepage of Baidu search results does not exceed 20%, and the rest are free search results. But what is noteworthy is that Liu Jianguo admitted that the 20% of the bidding rankings were also passed through manual review.
In fact, during the interview, the reporter found that more than one insider of each major search company was worried about some of the company's practices to improve performance. They said that with the continuous development of the search market , many colleagues have realized the contradiction between Internet users’ search experience and excessive commercialization, but senior leaders seem to have not thought of coming up with some good solutions.
In-depth analysis
Search engines are vulnerable in the face of money
Facing the temptation of economic interests, the fairness of search engines is gradually disappearing
< p>The Internet is called the eyeball economy, traffic equals wealth, and search engines are no exception. According to a reporter's survey, the search business has become the biggest hope for major Internet companies to get out of the cold winter after online games. Therefore, major Internet companies are rushing to this continent. On September 17, NetEase Youdao search officially launched its search service; in addition, Alibaba also expressed interest in search services, which led to the "baobao war" between Baidu and Taobao that caused a sensation in the industry.The best example is Baidu. If when Baidu was listed on Nasdaq in 2005, investors still regarded it as the Chinese version of Google, now the vast majority of investors should have believed that even Google would be difficult to shake Baidu's leading advantage in China. As of September 24, Baidu's stock price has reached as high as US$275.5, ten times higher than the issue price of US$27 when it went public. In 2008, when the "winter theory" was popular, Baidu's second-quarter profit increased by 87% to US$39 million, and revenue doubled to US$117 million.
But it is worth noting that most of Baidu’s revenue comes from bidding rankings. Baidu CEO Robin Li has publicly admitted that more than 80% of Baidu's performance comes from bidding rankings. One of Baidu's customers, 58.com CEO Yao Jinbo, once revealed that about a few million yuan is invested in Baidu search engine keywords every year, but this only belongs to Baidu's medium-sized customers.
Google’s business model has even been questioned globally. Although Google has been looking to expand its revenue channels over the years, such as experimenting with banner display ads and offline ads, radio and TV ads, etc., the vast majority of Google’s revenue today still relies on text placed in search engine search results and third-party websites. advertising business.
"Paid advertising is still the main source of income for major search engines." A search marketing expert pointed out that on the one hand, the rising performance has led to search engines being numb to user experience; on the other hand, , search engines and advertising agencies are inextricably linked. Under the contradiction, search engines will more often choose to "sacrifice" user experience.
The moral paradox of search engines
In fact, the excessive commercialization of search engines not only reduces the search user experience, but also causes netizens to question the ethics of search engines. The recent "********" incident is directly aimed at Baidu's search practices.
Some Baidu people said that they only put websites related to user search keywords in higher positions. In addition, after some users expressed dissatisfaction, Baidu began to add the two words "promotion" below these advertisements. characters for easy identification. Google, Soso, Youdao, etc. stated that paid search results are placed outside the main search list.
But these statements cannot hide the fact: whoever pays more money, or whoever pays early can appear at the front of the search results.
For netizens, for example, if you want to search for the quality of a certain product, most of the information ranked first in the results may be the name of the channel that sells the product, and you may even unknowingly contribute to the search engine. For example, Lao Wang didn't expect that he had contributed at least more than ten yuan in income to the search engine. The problem is that users’ voices questioning corporate ethics do not seem to have affected the impressive performance of search companies with huge user bases at all.
As users become increasingly dissatisfied with the search engine experience, the search engine industry has experienced a large number of lawsuits. Recently, there has been an increasing number of lawsuits, which are companies suing search engines. Placing its search ranking too low in non-paid searches may even result in being blocked by search engines. For example, Duolaimi Chinese website sued Google for unfair search. Duolaimi Chinese Network said that when searching in Google with the keyword "Duolaimi Chinese Network", the company's webpage was displayed in the 37th item of the query results. Duolaimi Company has therefore received many complaints from customers. and accountability. Duolaimi Chinese website immediately took Google to court for "violating the principle of equal treatment".
Even NetEase CEO Ding Lei publicly "bombarded" the current domestic search engine industry at the Youdao press conference: "Search engine companies use search to favor their own products and businesses, and it has become a problem to interfere with search results. Unspoken rules in the industry.”
The ethical shortcomings of search engines have attracted the attention of relevant departments. Yan Jiangying, spokesperson of the State Food and Drug Administration, said that at present, in addition to directly monitoring and cracking down on counterfeit drug sales websites, it has communicated with some comprehensive portal websites and search engines, requiring them to take social responsibility as their own responsibilities and take measures to clean up illegal drug advertisements. . "Because medicines are so special, patients buy medicines in the hope of curing their illnesses. If false medical information is provided, search engines will help the evildoers, seek wealth and harm lives."
Multiple Perspectives
Who To stop search engine ethics?
Moderator: our reporter Huang Xu
Interlocutor: Yu Guofu, chief lawyer of Beijing Shengfeng Law Firm
Senior programmer, netizen: Zhang Qunyi
Our reporter learned that in the eyes of Americans, search engines are social public tools and need to bear their own moral responsibilities and submit to corresponding supervision. Therefore, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires search engines to disclose how advertising fees affect website rankings, and requires search engines to set up "clear" signs to separate paid and free search results, otherwise legal action will be taken to enforce them.
But in China, there is a lack of corresponding restrictions on search engines. Who is going to stop and restrict search engine ethics? Our reporter talked with lawyer Yu Guofu, director of Beijing Shengfeng Law Firm, who has in-depth analysis of the Internet, and netizen Pianpian Maplehong, a senior programmer.
Reporter: Are China’s major search engines currently over-commercialized? What do you think about this?
Zhang Qunyi: As a programmer, I often need to go to a certain small website. But one day, I suddenly couldn't find it through a certain search engine. I continued to search for related issues and found that it was said to be blocked due to search because the website did not advertise on the search engine. With the popularization of the Internet and the explosive growth of network information, people are becoming more and more dependent on search engines. At this time, search engines are no longer simply a tool for searching information, and they will cause great harm to society. far-reaching impact. This excessive pursuit of commercialization and neglect of user experience is obviously unethical behavior.
Yu Guofu: The current mainstream search engine operators are commercial companies with the purpose of profit. Therefore, search engines will definitely have a lot of commercial activities, and even the ultimate goal of search engines is to achieve their profit goals. Other aspects, such as morality, are probably just a means to achieve profitability.
Reporter: Do search engines currently have certain rules that need to be followed and restricted? Do we need to assume moral and legal responsibilities?
Zhang Qunyi: As far as I know, in the United States, search engines need to assume their own moral responsibilities and submit to corresponding supervision. In China, this kind of regulation has not yet been heard of.
But shouldn’t search engines be held responsible? I don’t think so. As I just said, search engines have had a profound impact on society. Just like a highway, you can’t just consider making money. If there are no corresponding restrictions and if you don’t assume moral responsibility, it may Endangering the public's right to know and information transparency is a corporate social responsibility issue.
Yu Guofu: Search engine is a relatively special product. This product is developed and owned by a certain company, so he is the maker of the rules for this product. Unless search engines infringe upon others' trademark rights, patent rights and copyrights when providing search services, they should bear legal responsibility. Therefore, there are currently no standardized or prohibitive regulations on search engine services. According to the principle that the commercial operations of search engines can be done without prohibition by law, as long as they do not violate relevant legal provisions, even if they are highly commercialized, they are only issues of business ethics and user experience, not legal issues. Frankly speaking, the lack of supervision of search engines has amplified the trend of pursuing commercial interests alone.
Reporter: On the one hand, there is a lack of search engine supervision, and on the other hand, users are increasingly dissatisfied with the search engine experience. How to restrict the excessive commercialization of search engines?
Zhang Qunyi: Some search engines are what they are today because of their users. Users may also abandon them, and only fair and socially responsible search engines will be accepted by users. Therefore, even if there is no law, I think search engines should consider how to do it. This is not only adhering to a company's moral bottom line, but also protecting the public's right to know, and laying the foundation for its own future destiny. It's up to you to make the public rules, but I can always vote no with my feet, right?
Yu Guofu: For mainstream search engine manufacturers such as Baidu, Google, and Yahoo, each has its own technical rules for collecting, crawling, and sorting search engine information, and even commercialization models. These are undoubtedly It should be respected. However, too much emphasis on user experience will inevitably affect the realization of its commercial interests, making it impossible to gain a foothold in the market; too much emphasis on profitability will inevitably lead to a decline in user experience, failure in the battle for users, and poor profitability. Therefore, there cannot be any partiality between the two.
Therefore, I think that due to the increasing social influence of search engines, it is necessary for relevant national departments to conduct research and legislation specifically on search engines, and to carry out necessary regulations on the behavior of search engines to avoid excessive use of search engines. Negative impacts caused by commercialization.