February 05, 2010
OpEd Guest Post By Daniel Broche – Founder and CEO of Discounteo
We asked, Daniel Broche, the Founder and CEO of Discounteo.com, to translate his post about Google Suggest and how it negatively impacted CNFDI (The National Private Distance Learning Group). CNFDI observed an error with Google Suggest which would suggest “CNFDI scam” whenever a user would type in CNFDI. The Court of Appeeal of Paris sanctioned Google for this on the basis of public insult. French ecommerce blogger and expert, Daniel Broche, had the following to say about this situation:
Google
was condemned by French court in the trial related to CNFDI. This is
good news for ecommerce. Indeed, it is very harmful for a company to see
words like “arnaque” (ie: scam, fraud, swindle…) in Google automated
suggest, when its brand name is entered in the search engine field.
Recognition of this fact by the courts is a positive sign.
In fact, among all the very good services of Google Inc, I consider
Google Suggest to have major defaults in comparison. Of course, when an exagerated or
worrying term is suggested, it creates interest. A mix of fear and
voyeurism ensues: Who wants to be ripped-off on the Internet? Moreover Google
has not provided clues that this service cannot be hacked and
manipulated: what if I create a bot and sent large amounts of queries about a 2
word combination in order to enter it in the top ten? Then it will
climb alone due to insane curiosity.
From a technical point of view, I assume that Google Suggest is built
on a conceptual mistake. The Google Suggest mechanism is suffering positive
feedback amplification. Engineers have to develop auto-regulated systems
with retroactive feedback and avoid positive feedback that may lead to
extreme and abnormal conditions: Imagine a powerful light in the middle
of the night. While it’s great that you can see what is around, the problem is that it illuminates the mosquitos. The more you try to see how many mosquitoes are around, the more
you attract to you! This is the positive feedback loop leading to a
stupid situation. Google is lighting the whole street and even your
house (brand). And when you ask them to reduce or adapt the light in
order to limit mosquitoes, it replies: “Sorry we don’t provide light
switches and we don’t kill mosquitoes because it is evil.” Is the only
solution to build new law which fixes lightening policies because of
mosquitoes? We would prefer for instance a human regulation system for
brands.
We, at Discounteo.com, are directly concerned: Since august 2009, we
have noticed that “*discounteo arnaque*
” appears in Google Suggest (both
google.fr and google.com). We can’t know if it results from
unpredictable algorithm effects or manipulation by an unprofessional competitor.
However what we know for sure is that our real customers satisfaction
rate has remained very good since the launch of the shop in 2005.
Every day hundreds of messages are sent by Fianet, Kelkoo, Shopzilla to
collect feedback and publish reviews. We are among the best French shops
in our product area (home appliances)!
We are not alone. Other examples of French companies that must deal with
this injuring keyword associated to their name include Zlio and Direct Energie.
To have a plenary overview of this topic, we also tried to look at
Google Suggest results with “arnaque” + 1 letter
Once more the tool select various brands in the top ten. Main Google
challengers are all concerned: “/arnaque e/” = eBay, “/arnaque m/”=
Microsoft, “/arnaque y/”= Yahoo, “/arnaque w/” = Wikipedia…
But strangely, “/arnaque g/”: No Google presence on Google.fr
I definitely do not understand how Google Suggest works….
Note 1: Discounteo is a European registered trademark
Note 2: I dealt only with the brand reputation issue because it
directly impacts ecommerce: About one person in five who comes to
Discounteo through “Discounteo” keyword is a customer. Maybe it would
be interesting to look also at Google Suggest proposals for people…
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