Google would sooner shut down all of Adsense than compromise its search quality. The former would decrease revenue, the latter would be an existential threat to the company. (Look at Google's quarterly reports if you don't believe me.) Even if you don't believe that Google is trying to do more than make money, it should be sufficient to look at the numbers.
"Revenue" is not a metric used to decide whether ranking changes launch. Period.
Sorry but I don't believe this isn't brought up when considering algorithm changes or improvements. If it's not your department it's someones elses (maybe they are ignored or higher up then you?). You mean nobody stands up and says "Hey this will drop our AdSense revenue by X millions if we do this"? It seems a bit reckless to not consider other impacts of algorithm changes when your company is in fact doing all of this to generate a profit.
It's true. It's never brought up as a matter of principle. In fact, a ranking change that could theoretically reward a site for using Google products would not launch.
Didn't AdWords advertisers get a quality score discount (through higher ad clickthrough rates + free checkout processing) for using Google Checkout?
The official page for Google Checkout to this day states "Google Checkout users click on ads 10% more when the ad displays the Checkout badge, meaning more traffic to your site."
That is a pretty clear-cut example of Google tilting their "algorithm" toward promoting another Google product. And in an area where one of our small clients didn't use Google Checkout, that change simply priced him out of the ad auction. His profit margins after ad costs were roughly 10% & with that 10% cut in relative clickthrough rate he no longer had a place in Google's ad auction. He was forced to use another Google product if he wanted to be profitable with AdWords.
Of course one could say that the organic results are different than the paid results, but the Google editions ebooks ranked quickly in the US after the ebook store was launched, Google only rolled out universal search after they bought YouTube, maps & local results now come with tags that earn incremental revenues from the "organic" search results, etc.
Lets see two quotes:
"GAAP net income in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $2.54 billion"
"Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.50 billion, or 30% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2010."
If Google 'shut down all of Adsense' because they realized it compromised their search quality, they would have had only $40M in net revenue for the quarter last year. (Doing the simple math of removing AdSense revenue from the picture.)
So you think Sergey and Larry would put up with a 30% drop in revenue to take the high road? We're talking 2.5 billion dollars here, not mouse nuts even to Google.
Shutting down Adsense would be a death blow for Google, compromising search quality is a coin toss. I find it very hard to believe that effects to revenue are not thought about or discussed before making changes, it seems irresponsible and suicidal.
