The Google search engine has been close to all our hearts since it started; it won us over with its speed, the relevancy of its results and its uncluttered, no-nonsense approach. So the world flocked to it to the point that doing a search has become synonymous with the brand: we 'google' it.
This clean and pure Google with the buy line 'Do no evil' didn't last, however. The purity of the information democracy started to be eroded by the necessities of our commercial world, something which none of us should be surprised about. Please excuse me now whilst I present a very very truncated history of what happened. First came Google Adwords, Google's pay per click advertising platform. The most notable difference on Google's results pages was that suddenly there were all these extra links down the side and sometimes above the "real" search engine results. Ever since then, website owners and SEO specialists starting coming up against Google manipulating its algorithm progressiv...
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