| HN Mirror

Plenty of products/services like Windows, Xerox, tipex start as generic terms or become them during their lifetime. I'm not saying that they should therefore always come first, but it's instructive if you compare xerox to this website - they dominate the entire first page of google results. What should come first is what would be useful for end users, and I think it's fair to expect a company named after and with an url of a phrase to come at least once on that first page, if lots of people link to them (as from other search engine results they appear to). If that's not the case, Google should be transparent about why these penalties are applied. I understand why they don't want to be transparent for commercial reasons and to stop people gaming the system, but think given their monopoly position it behoves them to be so. Otherwise they can destroy businesses maliciously or, even worse, with complete indifference.

Personally I find Google is providing results which are less and less useful, with their recent emphasis on monetising search, indifference to fairness, and lack of transparency as to their ranking methods - it certainly seems as if in this case a draconian penalty has been applied, and there is no effective way to appeal or even find out what the judgement against them was (webmasters very often is not helpful). A penalty of a few places would be completely understandable if they don't like this site for whatever reason, a penalty of 8 pages while other spammy results dominate search terms is not.

I've switched to DuckDuckGo for now and it's pretty good. Compare the results for Tipex (a popular brand of correction fluid in Europe) for example:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tipex https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tipex