Search Risk – How Google Almost Killed ProtonMail

juan juan.g71 at gmail.com
Wed Oct 26 11:58:45 PDT 2016



	I'm eagerly waiting for the list's corporate apologists to
	'scientifically' explain (away) google's actions.




> In the past two months, many of you have reached out to us to ask
> about the mysterious tweets we sent to Google in August. At
> ProtonMail, transparency is a core value, and we try to be as
> transparent with our community as possible. As many people have
> continued to point out to us, we need to be more transparent here to
> avoid continued confusion and speculation. Thus, we are telling the
> full story today to clarify what happened.
> 
> What Happened?
> 
> The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding
> ProtonMail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and
> ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because ProtonMail has
> long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
> 
> When ProtonMail launched in Beta back in May 2014, our community
> rapidly grew as people from around the world came together and
> supported us in our mission to protect privacy in the digital age.
> Our record breaking crowdfunding campaign raised over half a million
> dollars from contributors and provided us with the resources to make
> ProtonMail competitive against even the biggest players in the email
> space.
> 
> By the summer of 2015, ProtonMail passed half a million users and was
> the world’s most well known secure email service. ProtonMail was also
> ranking well in Google search at this time, on the first or second
> page of most queries including “encrypted email” and “secure email”.
> However, by the end of October 2015, the situation had changed
> dramatically, and ProtonMail was mysteriously no longer showing up
> for searches of our two main keywords.
> 
> Between the beginning of the summer and the fall of 2015, ProtonMail
> did undergo a lot of changes. We released ProtonMail 2.0, we went
> fully open source, we launched mobile apps in beta, and we updated
> our website, changing our TLD from .ch to the more widely known .com.
> We also doubled in size, growing to nearly 1 million users by the
> fall. All of these changes should have helped ProtonMail’s search
> rankings as we became more and more relevant to more people.
> 
> In November 2015, we became aware of the problem and consulted a
> number of well known SEO experts. None of them could explain the
> issue, especially since ProtonMail has never used any blackhat SEO
> tactics, nor did we observe any used against us. Mysteriously, the
> issue was entirely limited to Google, as this anomaly was not seen on
> any other search engine. Below are the search rankings for ProtonMail
> for ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’ taken at the beginning of
> August 2016 across all major search engines. We rank on either page 1
> or 2 everywhere except Google where we are not ranked at all.
> 
> image: protonmail seo rankings
> 
> All throughout Spring 2016, we worked in earnest to get in touch with
> Google. We created two tickets on their web spam report form
> explaining the situation. We even contacted Google’s President EMEA
> Strategic Relationships, but received no response nor improvement.
> Around this time, we also heard about the anti-trust action brought
> forward by the European Commission against Google, accusing Google of
> abusing its search monopoly to lower the search rankings of Google
> competitors. This was worrying news, because as an email service that
> puts user privacy first, we are the leading alternative to Gmail for
> those looking for better data privacy.
> 
> In August, with no other options, we turned to Twitter to press our
> case. This time though, we finally got a response, thanks in large
> part to the hundreds of ProtonMail users who drew attention to the
> issue and made it impossible to ignore. After a few days, Google
> informed us that they had “fixed something” without providing further
> details. The results could be immediately seen.
> 
> image: google protonmail search risk
> 
> ProtonMail Google Search Ranking for “Encrypted Email”
> 
> In the above plots, the x-axis is time and the y-axis is search
> ranking (lower number is better). The dates where there are no data
> points are times when we are not ranked at all by Google. After
> Google made some changes, ProtonMail’s rankings immediately recovered
> and are now ranked #1 and #3 for ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’
> respectively. Without any additional explanation from Google, we may
> never know why ProtonMail become unranked. In any case, we do
> appreciate Google finally taking action to resolve the issue, we just
> wished it happened sooner.
> 
> The Danger of Search Risk
> 
> This incident however highlights a previously unrecognized danger that
> we are now calling Search Risk. The danger is that any service such as
> ProtonMail can easily be suppressed by either search companies, or the
> governments that control those search companies. This can happen even
> across national borders. For example, even though Google is an
> American company, it controls over 90% of European search traffic. In
> this case, Google directly caused ProtonMail’s growth rate worldwide
> to be reduced by over 25% for over 10 months.
> 
> This meant that ProtonMail’s income from users was also cut by 25%,
> putting financial pressure on our operations. We went from being able
> to cover all our monthly expenses to having to draw from our emergency
> reserve fund. The lost income and financial damage incurred as a
> result was several hundred thousand Swiss Francs (1 CHF = 1.01 USD),
> which will never be reimbursed.
> 
> The only reason we survived to tell this story is because the majority
> of ProtonMail’s growth comes from word of mouth, and our community is
> too loud to be ignored. Many other companies won’t be so fortunate.
> This episode illustrates that Search Risk is serious, which is why we
> now agree with the European Commission that given Google’s dominant
> position in search, more transparency and oversight is critical.
> 
> Links images and a bit more:
> https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/




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