| Agreed. Google shared with us early last year that the revenue split on Adsense is 68% (http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...) - meaning you keep 68% of what they are paid to run the ad and they keep 32%. You can imagine some very respectable proportion of their income every year is the 1/3 coming from spam/scraped/etc. adsense placements. Another interesting article on HN just new is that Google's algorithms already seem to know what crap content is and what good content is: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2011/01/google-probabl... and my guess is that Google will only roll out improved search results when the cost to the company is great enough to justify the loss of income. It is a publicly traded company, I don't think Google can just cut out millions of dollars of revenue from their bottom line because they want to not be evil - the shareholders would probably ask for people's heads on platters. Of course only Google knows the extent of which their income-from-spam is, but I imagine it is significant otherwise they would have solved that problem already as the interest in Duck Duck GO, Blekko and Bing/Yahoo continues to rise/be-discussed-more (Don't know if the ACTUAL usage suggests that people are doing more than just talking or moving over to using different services full time) Google's compute power is other-worldly. This WP article doesn't do it justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform#Data_centers and I have had a hard time trying to find an article that was written 2 years ago about the data centers around the globe that Google has built. The scale is unbelievable of each installation and there are something like 30 around the globe right now:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/11/map-of-all-google-data-c... More than nefarious under-dealings, I think this situation literally snuck up on Google and by the time the publicly-traded company had algorithms to determine the extent of the shenanigans, they realized it would have a noticeable effect on their bottom line if they simply culled all those results out in one day. They are either going to roll out changes in stages and slowly increase the quality while keeping an eye on what that does to Adsense income and really publicize each change so they rebuild trust with all of us, or they will respond heavy-handidly in a year or so with a "new algorithm change" that "online publishers are up in arms about!" again. My guess is on the slow-and-gradual approach with a big publicity boost so we are shown they care and are working on it Matt Cutts-style :) While I've noticed the lagging quality in their search, I still use the Big-G... it's fast for me and gives me accurate results. Then again I mostly search for tech, if I was searching for weight loss, health, sex, appliances or any other topic that is DOMINATED by ads, I would have given up and gone back to using a damn phone book a while ago. |
Ultimately I'd guess Google's shareholders will be even more worried about lost search market share (particularly if it's early adopter migration) than Adsense revenue dips...