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Google's Search Results Degraded?
scrm writes "According to this Wired article, recent tweaks to Google's PageRank search algorithm have degraded rather than improved the accuracy of the results." I noticed this firsthand the other day, but only when I was searching for pictures of famous people, but all my technical queries came back fine.
Regardless of whether or not the changes have degraded the service Google provides, unless Google (quickly) addresses this problem to the (at least superficial) satisfaction of people, it will hurt Google.
AlltheWeb.com must be soaking this up with glee.
-- jetlag --
This is most probably not intentional.
There are glitches in every complicated software. Maybe they were trying out some new algorithm that wasn't completely refined yet. Maybe it was a random off-by-one bug that has been already fixed. Shit happens all the time, Google is no different.
There will probably be many people who try to see a conspiracy theory behind this and say that Google has sold out.
This is very unlikely. The nature of the described flaw suggests that all queries are affected. Now why should they skew the results of everything to appease a single entity who might have given them some money? That just doesn't make sense.
When men used to be men
F.F.S.: I wouldn't be surprised if Slashdot showed up top result for goatse.cx, the number of people linking to it from here...
/Styx
registro wrote:
This doesn't make sense. The current top result on a search for `correo gratis' is LatinMail - Tu Correo Gratuito En Español. It seems to me that the listings have gotten more accurate, not less, if my search in Spanish for free mail returns a Spanish company instead of a Yankee one (Hotmail is Microsoft, in case you weren't aware). LatinMail belongs to eresMas, who are headquartered in Madrid.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
Google's results are now less accurate because people are cheating. The way pagerank works is widely documented, and people abuse from it to get better scores.
I work for a company that hosts pr0n sites. Maybe 95% of our partneers are cheating that way. Fake sites, fake auto-generated HTML pages (with pseudo real sentences), cloaking (what Google sees is not what visitors see), javascript tricks, etc. are a must. They spend most of their time on trapping google, it brings more money than working on the site itself.
The company I'm working for has even a team working full-time on this (spamming search engines, and creating thousands of fake sites just to promote one real site) .
{{.sig}}
Here's why.
Your job, as a webmaster, is to produce a user friendly, useful, maybe informative website.
Google's job, as a search engine, is to find the sites most likely to be of interest to a user, based on their search terms.
Therefore,
To get good rankings, all you have to do as a webmaster is produce a user friendly, useful, maybe informative website.
It is Google's job to optimise to the web, not the web's job to optimise to Google.
So,
Search Engine Optimisation is big massive NET LOSS to you, because all it results in is getting visitors who aren't the slightest bit interested in your website or product.
It also results in a soon to be pretty useless Google, so please don't do it.
I agree with you 100%, but I don't think it'll ever happen. If everyone did as you suggested, and no one cheated, we'd live in a perfect index world - search results would accurately reflect what's on the web. Searches would be easier, and more relevant sites would come up with more specific searches. The number of hits you got coming from Google (or anyone else) would likely depend on the "real" content of your site.
Then, one day, someone would rediscover that by putting "Anna Kournikova Blowjob" on their site, they'd get some hits they wouldn't have otherwise. No harm, they think, it's a few bytes and it's not hurting anyone. Webmaster tells his friends, they tell their coworkers, and this continues until the search engines have to begin working around the issue.
Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, people aren't always honest, especially when it's something they perceive as benefiting them without hurting anyone else, especially if the benefit is financial. They don't care about the integrity of some other website's engine, they care about profits. Realize also that even personal sites do this; people like other people to see what they've made. While your idea is a great fantasy, near-perfect search results will only come from human-edited sites, or a better algorithm than we have now.
If a site is "convicted" of google-spamming (use the ranking engine to prescreen, and human checking to verify), or of helping to spam, it should be permanently blocked from the results by name and IP.
Result: pr0n sites will be too terrified of deletion to munge their ratings.