Comments on: Google Answers Your Health Questions With Health OneBox http://searchengineland.com/google-answers-your-health-questions-with-health-onebox-24675 Search Engine Land: News On Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:39:57 -0500 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: dmarsch http://searchengineland.com/google-answers-your-health-questions-with-health-onebox-24675/comment-page-1#comment-6789 dmarsch Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:26:33 +0000 http://searchengineland.com/?p=24675#comment-6789 This seems like a moderately big deal. Google just elected to put their content as the first result, even though it's unoriginal content that dozens of sites have licensed, including one of their other quick links, Medline Plus. People freaked out about Knols, thinking that Google was getting into the publishing business, and would quickly succumb to the temptation of boosting their results higher. Knols fizzled and that didn't happen, but it happened quite suddenly with Google Health. Using this as a model, there's no reason Google couldn't license bodies of content and immediately boost themselves to the top. How does this not damage their claim that they organize, rather than build content? Or that their algorithm is responsible for ranking results rather than which partners or content they want to promote? This seems like a moderately big deal. Google just elected to put their content as the first result, even though it’s unoriginal content that dozens of sites have licensed, including one of their other quick links, Medline Plus.

People freaked out about Knols, thinking that Google was getting into the publishing business, and would quickly succumb to the temptation of boosting their results higher. Knols fizzled and that didn’t happen, but it happened quite suddenly with Google Health. Using this as a model, there’s no reason Google couldn’t license bodies of content and immediately boost themselves to the top.

How does this not damage their claim that they organize, rather than build content? Or that their algorithm is responsible for ranking results rather than which partners or content they want to promote?

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