Mar. 27, 2024 12:35 pm PST – SEO Gazette | By Luke Ross
A trial ‘debrief’ document from Google’s antitrust trial last Fall has been released and in the docket. It states that there’s “substantial evidence” of search quality increasing and Google Ad prices decreasing.
However, these released documents have caused some stir within the SEO community and there’s some valid reasons as to why.
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Google’s Post-Trial Debrief: SEO Importance
The (123) pages of this post-trial brief are written extremely carefully and tactically, with legality and PR first in mind, a smart legal move on Google’s behalf; however, it makes it seem that the company has done an in-depth ‘investigation’ into themselves, finding ‘nothing wrong’ naturally. Then, reporting to the DOJ and the rest of the world that all is good in the search engine market and that search quality is just non-stop improving with happy users and helpful content for everyone.
The released Google debrief, generally speaking, is important to search engine optimization because of the amount of opinions across the SEO community currently stating exactly the opposite; that search quality has degraded significantly, not improved.
“The record is replete with evidence of Google’s search innovations, which range from paradigm-shifting breakthroughs in artificial intelligence to an endless stream of improvements to specific categories of queries based on insights from its teams of search quality engineers and human raters.”
– United States of America v. Google LLC, 1:20-cv-03010, (D.D.C. Feb 23, 2024) ECF No. 833 | Defendant’s Post-Trial Brief to 826 Sealed Document by GOOGLE LLC (Schmidtlein, John)
This post-trial ‘debrief’ has many legal factors at play into all of the terminology and statements used, one term in particular that the community was questioning was the ‘IS Score’ referenced in the following quote from page 37:
“– Google unceasingly strives to better its search quality, annually setting goals to improve its search quality as measured by IS score.” FOF ¶¶ 227-37
– United States of America v. Google LLC, 1:20-cv-03010, (D.D.C. Feb 23, 2024) ECF No. 833 | Defendant’s Post-Trial Brief to 826 Sealed Document by GOOGLE LLC (Schmidtlein, John)
According to a report last week from Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, the term IS score is “Google’s own internal ‘information satisfaction’ score.” It was also mentioned in this article that Google said, “Barriers to entry [search engine market share] are not significant and are falling rapidly.”
While this statement should be objective based on fact and statistics, it’s rather subjective by Google itself because of the amount of overwhelming evidence that Google is the only key player in the search engine ‘industry’.
The above screenshot of a portion of page of the released documents shows one of many examples of Google’s attempt of proving that Microsoft Bing has all resources/assets or ‘tools in the toolbox’ available to successfully infiltrate Google’s dominant 91% plus share of the search engine market.
However, an analysis conducted during the trial revealed that Google faces far greater competition from both Yelp and Amazon than it does from Bing. Read this quote retrieved from page 12:
“FOF ¶¶ 953-65. “In particular, his analysis revealed that Google faces greater competition for users with shopping queries from Amazon than it does from Microsoft’s Bing, and greater competition for users with local queries from Yelp than it does from Bing.” FOF ¶¶ 960, 964.”
Conclusion
Fed up with Google? The SEO community seems to be as of right now.
Constant ranking volatility, sites mysteriously disappearing from SERPs, Reddit, Quora, /1000 slugs, and not to mention unclear guidance w/ non-stop changes based on questionable ‘user’ data doesn’t help Google’s cause for gaining the public’s trust.
What do you think? Send us an email at [email protected] with your opinion.
Article written by Luke Austin Ross, SEO Gazette LLC
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