[jrockway]

This doesn't bother me. If my website got delisted from Google, I'd find traffic in some other way. If my ads didn't get run by Google, I'd just advertise somewhere else.

Honestly, Google is not that big of a company. I checked out the Fortune 500 list, and Google is not even in the top 50. Amazon.com, Bank of America, and CVS Carkemark know a lot more about you than Google. And they don't care -- you come to them, and they sell you their product, and it's often a good deal for both sides. Google is just like this, except smaller.

In the IT industry, we like to think that Google is important. We see their logo a lot, we hear how nice it is to work there... but they are really small potatoes. Advertising is nothing. Giving people money, giving people drugs, selling gasoline, shipping books to your house overnight, and making light bulbs and jet engines is a lot more profitable than sending clicks to your website. Sorry, that's the reality... there is a lot more evil to be done in the world than Google is capable of. (Look at the number of Fortune 500 companies that are primarily military contractors. Their corporate mandate is to cause people to die as efficiently as possible -- Google manages your RSS feeds and cat pictures! Sorry, not evil.)

(Why isn't Google as heavily regulated as banks? Because they really don't matter that much. Yeah, you can search for your name on Google and see content that you put up on the web under your name. But the banks collect information about you, to make business decisions, without you ever even knowing. Right now, their computers are deciding whether or not you are a credit risk, and if they decide you are, they are canceling your credit card. That vacation you wanted? Gone. That house you wanted? Never. That's power that Google simply doesn't even come close to having!)

[asnyder]

Unlike the other companies mentioned there is very little alternative to Google. Especially if you target the technical demographic. If CVS does something bad, I can go to Rite Aid. However if Google delists you, your customers most likely won't go to Bing, or DuckDuckGo, you'll be dead. Furthermore, if you're not "relevant" to your search term, then advertising for that term will be prohibitively expensive. So you're screwed two ways.

I'm just saying their current status quo coupled with the power they have is scary. They should, like the banks, communicate with you. Even if it's not that detailed, a little bit of interaction goes a long way. They already have humans reading your reconsideration requests, they should allow them to issue a response, instead of just an automated reply. It shouldn't be this guessing game that we play. It's not OK that something that controls almost all of search is that inaccessible to communication, follow-up, and resolution.

[zaphar]

How much do you think they can tell you without revealing the signals they use to determine relevancy?

The fact is their current policy is in all likelihood the one that allows them to serve relevant results to the greatest number of people for the lowest cost. If they start giving it the personal touch as you say then the cost will go way up it won't bed just you and the occasional accidental delisted site owner but will be every spammer, con artist, and fly by night SEO expert. The support costs would be astronomical. And your hoped for solution is to have a government entity step in and mandate they spend that money in a hopeless attempt to let you talk to someone in person? In short you want the government to force Google to reduce its profits, potentially drastically, for your own personal benefit.

[jrockway]

Won't someone please think of the OP's failed business model? The government needs to protect the lucrative business of owning a link farm!!

[jrockway]

Why is it not OK? You are not their customer or shareholder; what obligation do they have to you?

Nobody else likes other search engines and can't find your site? Tough shit. That's not Google's concern and it's not the government's concern, which makes you responsible for dealing with it.

[asnyder]

What is wrong with you? First, you have no idea if I'm a customer or shareholder. Second, they have an obligation to their users and customers to conduct business in a reasonable way. If you actually read what I've been saying, which I know is very hard, because we have a tendency to skim and let our biases let our emotions get the best of us, I'm not saying anything crazy.

All I'm saying is that Google should set up some processes so that issues that can be major, such as an accidental delisting, or similar be addressed with some level of human interaction, whether it's an actual response, or an automated response letting you know the issues, nothing more.

In my opinion, and hopefully sometime in the near future the US Congress will agree, that it's not OK for something to have that much sway over the web and not be accountable or have any reasonable processes in place for corrections. It's just not.

[jrockway]

You keep saying the same thing over and over; you use the word "obligation". Why do you think they are obligated to reply to your emails? Are they legally obligated? Are they morally obligated? If so, why? How many people have to email them every day before they aren't obligated to reply anymore? Why?

Your point would be a lot clearer if you had said, "I wish" instead of "obligation". I wish a human at Google would reply to my email when they accidentally delist my site. I wish someone would spend $100 of Google's time to research my problem and talk to me. I wish Google would mail me ice cream and ponies once a week.

If you actually read what I've been saying, which I know is very hard, because we have a tendency to skim and let our biases let our emotions get the best of us, I'm not saying anything crazy.

If your sentences focused on one topic, and didn't diverge to psychoanalyze me, which I know is very hard, because we have a tendency to let our emotions get the best of us, causing a run on sentence, where the word obligation is used a lot, and holy shit this sort of thing is hard to read, emotions or not, and what was I saying? Oh yeah, your points would be easier to follow.

Anyway, Google's philosophy is to make decisions in general rather than in bulk and then they let the computers do the real work. It's the only sane thing they can do; there are billions of websites, and if they had to research every delisting case, they'd be out of business. It's no loss to Google or its users if your site doesn't show up in search results.

You just aren't all that important to Google or the rest of the world. Nor is anyone else.

[asnyder]

As with our exchanges in the past, this one is fruitless. You're words are untrue and inflammatory. I use obligation only once throughout all of my comments on this topic, and only in response to your usage of it. To say that the word obligation is used a lot is false, just like everything else you're saying.

You say you're not trolling but you just think this way, I'm sorry but I can't have any meaningful exchange with someone that's grasping at things that just aren't there.

[kelnos]

I think more of the fear of Google stems from the average person's relationship with it, and doesn't have much to do with how large a company it is.

BofA, Amazon, etc. are all companies that we deal with directly in a customer<->vendor relationship. Amazon puts up products for sale, people buy them. BofA gives people a place to put their money, in return for the ability to lend that money to others.

But your average Internet user isn't Google's customer. They're Google's product, and are "sold" to advertisers. People interact with Google every day, and in return, Google gets to collect, store, and mine our information in ways that we don't really know about or understand, and sell the results of that analysis to others.

So I think some of the Google-fear is based more on that than raw revenue generation. Being sold to advertisers on a massive scale is just kinda creepy.