I think everything is stupid

"I want to give kids more maps, and search engine algorithms should be transparent."

Just when you thought the douchebaggery at TechCrunch couldn’t get any worse, they post something that pushes the idiocy envelope.  Their latest post on The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO makes all kinds of no sense.  The primary assertion is:

(Search engines) that use rule-based algorithms to determine result sets must publicly disclose their methodologies. That is the means by which all businesses can compete freely in the organic and paid search marketplaces.

First, anyone without one’s head up one’s ass would realize that this would kill the search engine industry overnight.  If the algorithms were transparent, search engines would be owned (or pwned, if you prefer) by spammers and SEO shops before you can even say “Arrington is hiding behind a ghost writer.”  Suddenly the search results you see on Google, Yahoo and Bing would be given to you directly to whichever company spent the most time/money to get their link at the top, and odds are they wouldn’t be relevant - they’d be for viagra, mesothelioma, or naked pictures of Hayden Panettiere.  One out of those three I would actually like, and it’s not the naked pictures.

TC claims the article is written by a “well known executive at one of the largest sites on the Internet” who wants to be anonymous “because of the backlash he would receive from the SEO industry and possibly Google itself.”  Smart move from one of the flat-out dumbest authors I’ve seen on teh Intarwebs, at least since this guy who last week called Google a Ponzi scheme.  Why can’t Darwin do something to get rid of these guys?

Apparently Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is successful.  Why? According to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, Bing is “something of a hit” because a tenuous majority of his readers says it is, although if you actually read the comments many are positive but most are just shocked it doesn’t completely suck.

Arrington didn’t even bother to run a poll or survey of his own readers - he just read through the comments and declared a Microsoft victory in his headline, thereby guaranteeing pageviews and a whole new heap of blog comments.  That’s great marketing, but what happened to real journalism?

For a more sensible review, try Mashable.