LogFAQs > #885814895

Not_an_Owl posted...

So there's this:

http://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas-it-doesn-t-li-1798646437

tl;dr journalist in 2011 learns Google prioritizes results that get engagement on Google Plus and reports that fact; Google pressures her employer to take the story down and then prevents any trace of the original story from being found via Google search.

With the caveat that the story isn't sourced and relies solely on the writer's own memories, that is shady as fuck.

While it's definitely shady if they actually scrubbed it from Google searches, her headline and premise of "‘Put a Plus One button on your pages or your search traffic will suffer.’" is incredibly click-baity. The idea is that more popular search results (ones that got more +1s) will appear higher up in searches, so, yes, a site that doesn't include a +1 button would be at a disadvantage. But that's just a natural disadvantage from choosing not to use something that could get you more attention. The title, and the way she uses words like "suffers" (and originally used "dies) suggest Google was going out of its way to screw over people who didn't include the button, which simply wasn't true.

So while Google's actions were shady, her using the info for what amounts to click-bait was also pretty shady.
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