Good show Bas & Roy, great to have Danny as a guest. he came across really well and made a lot of sense. However when he tries to defend Google, he falls short now and then.

For example re: the timing of the Bing Sting release, Danny suggests that the misconception is that Google wanted to divert attention away from the webspam issues.

However, Google had already been catching flak from various angles on the search neutrality / antitrust issue for several months. The whole webspam hype came later, and Google may well have instigated the Bing sting as a PR stunt to divert attention away from the search neutrality / antitrust debate.

Danny admitting that he got the story as early as mid January, and that he chose to publish it the day he did, makes it rather suspect for him to be honest. He could not have missed the fact that releasing it the day of the Farsight event would be seen as a PR stunt. The fact that Danny says that he chose to publish the story that day, is nothing short of admitting that he willingly served as Google’s PR machine – which makes his whole impartiality plea rather hollow, imho.

Also, it’s blatantly obvious by the phrasings used in the article that Danny obviously sided with Google on that issue. From the headline to how the evidence was presented, the pro-Google bias is evident. He may no even be aware of this bias – our subconscious prejudices have a big impact on how we speak and write.

But I have to admit that Danny has since made extensive efforts to highlight Google’s hypocrisy, as well as Bing’s sturdy defence on this ‘copying SERPs’ non-issue. In the end I think this whole kerfuffle has harmed Google more than Bing. And unfortunately it’s also damaged SEL’s reputation.

Lastly, believing Google’s claim that they had to build the capability to manually alter SERPs, and then promising that they will remove that capability, that’s rather naive. Of course Google can alter the SERPs at their will – they’ve done it many times in the past and will continue to do it in the future. They claim they don’t because there are all sorts of legal issues involved, but you have to be pretty naive to actually believe it. Or perhaps Danny is very much pro-Google and unquestioningly repeats Google’s dubious claims. Take your pick.