Google wants business owners to know that it won't reward bad behavior. The company fixed a glitch in its search engine that made websites with complaints and negative reviews even more visible to searchers. Google developed an "algorithmic solution" which detects merchants with abysmal ratings from users and will work to keep those sites from being ranked highly in search results.

A story published in the New York Times last week was detailing a tale of consumer horror in which a Brooklyn eyewear merchant bullied customers into leaving furious tirades about the company on a slew of review websites. The more angry comments, the higher the company's site seemed to climb in the Google rankings, boosting its prominence and its sales.

Google was "horrified" to read the story and immediately convened a team that looked at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. "I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google?s search results," Google wrote at its blog.

"We can't say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future. We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google's ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That's why we cannot reveal the details of our solution - the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings - beyond what we've already said. We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google. And we will continue to work hard towards a better search," Google added.