Dec. 2: Google announced on Wednesday that it had changed the way it ranks search results so that un-scrupulous merchants wou-ld find it harder to appear prominently in searches. The change was prompted by a recent incident involving Vitaly Borker, a Brooklyn-based online seller of eyeglasses. Mr Borker claimed that he purposely shouted at and frightened some of the customers at DecorMyEyes.com because the online complaints actually worked in his favour in Google search results.
In essence, he claimed, Google’s search engine is unable to tell the difference between positive posts and withering online critiques. Therefore, the more complaints posted about Mr Borker’s site, the more likely customers would be to find his store ranked high on a Google search, which yielded him more revenue.
In a blog posting titled “Being bad to your customers is bad for your business,” Google said that it had revised its algorithm so that it could detect Mr Borker and “hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide extremely poor user experience.”
Google did not reveal how it had changed its algorithm, or how that change would affect online sellers like Mr Borker. It simply said that the more it reveals about the changes it made, the easier it will be for uns-crupulous sellers to game it.
“We can’t say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future,” Mr Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, wrote on the blog post. “We know that people will keep trying.”
With the changes, Mr Borker has already had a harder time pushing DecorMyEyes to its previous high rankings on Google. The store once showed up on the first page of a search of “Christian Audigier” and “eyeglasses.” As of Wednesday night, it was not in the first 20 pages. Mr Singhal said that the change was made after the company read in The New York Times about the ordeal of Clarabelle Rodriguez, who bought a pair of glasses and contact lenses from DecorMyEyes in July.
When she tried to return the frames and get a refund, Mr Borker (using one of his favourite pseudonyms, Tony Russo) commenced a campaign of phone and e-mail harassment. That included threats of litigation and chilling statements like “You put your hand in fire. Now it’s time to get burned.”
He also sent a photograph of the front of her apartment building, and in a separate e-mail wrote “I AM WATCHING YOU.” Ms Rodriguez went to the police several times and on October 27, Mr Borker was arrested and charged with aggravated harassment and stalking. Mr Borker is set to be arraigned on December 22.
In July, Ms Rodriguez’s search used only the brand name of the glasses she wanted. DecorMyEyes was at the top of Google’s main search page.