OK, I just made that term up.
But how else to explain why, when you Google the word Ethicurean, the second result after this blog is the website for Campton Place Restaurant in San Francisco?
The restaurant serves “an innovative, refined contemporary menu that marries classical techniques and the startlingly fresh seasonal foods available year-round in California,” which sounds all right, if a tad generic. However, “ethicurean” appears nowhere on the page, not even in the meta-tags in the source code.
WTF? Is Google now selling paid placements for search returns and not indicating it, or is there a simple explanation I’m missing?
Update: It was late, and I’m an idiot. Commenter V Smmoothe below is obviously right.
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February 9th, 2007 at 5:32 am
I think that’s what Google Adwords is all about (?) An advertiser “buys” the word to show thier site when word is searched. It doesn’t have to exist on the website, even in the metatags. It is strange that it doesn’t show on the sponsored links side though… maybe they paid more?
In a way, it’s kind of a compliment (even if unwanted).
-CG
February 9th, 2007 at 6:40 am
DQ,
First off, love the blog and read it in my regular rotation. However, I must say that what you are implying is a very serious accusation that goes against the Google ethics (and their motto — “Don’t be Evil”). And Cascadia Girl is flat out wrong.
My husband works for the big G and they don’t practice that shit. Yes, you can by Adwords but what that means is that you then show up as a *sponsered* result in a blue bar at the top or in the side bar. NOT in the actual results. That’s the kind of crap that Yahoo and MSN pull. Cost does not buy you a place in the regular search result column no matter what you do.
You should be blaming Campton Place and not Google for this. What is likely to have happened is that CP embedded the word “Ethicurean” somewhere in their code that you didn’t see. Or it could be a blog somewhere else that uses the word “ethicurean” on their page and then uses that word to link to CP. That’s how you end up typing in things like “really big idiot” and getting a link to the White House’s webpage (this one doesn’t work, but others like it have).
For the first 3 months of my blog, Google didn’t even crawl my site and despite having a spouse that works there, there was no way to change that except by getting more people reading me and clicking on my site. They don’t/won’t manipulate their results, it is simply based on how popular that site is in reference to the search term.
I’ll pass this on to my hubby to see if he can get to the root of this.
In any case, I obviously feel pretty strongly about this. After all, Google serves my husband healthy/local/sustainable lunch everyday, and enables us to eat that way at home as well.
xoxo
Joy, a.k.a. The Restaurant Whore
February 9th, 2007 at 7:44 am
Like Joy says, above, Google doesn’t work that way.
Both second and third results don’t have Ethicurean. Campton Place - they only have a PR of 3, too… so how they could come up is really odd. I viewed their source code and still no Ethicurean in it. Hmmm…
February 9th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Joy — I didn’t actually believe Google was being evil, and shouldn’t even have joked about them blurring the lines between AdWords and paid search, as I don’t think they would ever do that. They’re pretty much my favorite publicly held company, and they’ve been VERY good to my husband, too.
I humbly retract any accidental aspersions about Google, and Campton Place, too. I mean, it’s silly. We’re way too tiny and insignificant for anyone to have bothered Googlejacking us. I’m sure it’s just some weird quirk of the internets.
Oh and by the way, I have read, giggled over, and lurked around your Restaurant Whore blog for months.
~Bonnie
P.S. Jack, the third site is for Ad Macauley, the artist who drew our pig, and I suspect he does have a link to us somewhere.
February 9th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Oh, the way Google’s algorithim works, you don’t have to have a word anyway on your page or in your source code for it to come up. The words other people use in proximity to linking to your page are equally important. Hence the practice of “google bombing.”
February 9th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Bonnie,
No need to apologize to me, love. My comments came out more snarky than intended (a side effect of doing it at 6:40 in the morning and, well, being me).
For my part, when I think “ethicurean,” I think only of this fabulous site.
Now please excuse me while I go eat a sustainable Zuni lunch.
February 9th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Joy did a great job summarizing. Google very clearly separates “sponsored links” (ads) from web search results. Google never has (and never will) accept payment to modify the order of our search results.
On the topic of Googlebombs, recent work at Google is aiming to take care of this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
Hope that helps!
February 9th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Oh, just an update. A little hunting leads me to believe that SF Food Blogger Becks & Posh is most likely inadvertently responsible for the Google results, due to complimentary posts both about the restaurant and this site. (That’s where I first discovered the blog, BTW, and you’ve become my favorite food blog in very short order.)