Slashdot Mirror
Texas Opens Inquiry Into Google Search Rankings
Hugh Pickens writes "The AP reports that Texas' attorney general, Greg Abbott, has opened an anti-trust investigation against Google spurred by complaints that the company has abused its power as the Internet's dominant search engine. The review appears to be focused on whether Google is manipulating its search results to stifle competition. European regulators already have been investigating complaints alleging that Google has been favoring its own services in its results instead of rival websites and several lawsuits have also been filed in the US that have alleged Google's search formula is biased. However Google believes Abbott is the first state attorney general to open an antitrust review into the issue."
Google's ranking algorithm *is* public. Read Amy Langville's book, "Google's PageRank and Beyond."
What isn't public is how the values of certain thresholds are determined to, for example, weed out link farms and add small statistical variations to the link adjacency matrix so that it can be more easily solved. These are determined heuristically -- trial and error, in essence.
The devil is in the details, but who cares -- search indexes are easy enough to build and even easier to filter and skew.
Google is just flattering itself by pretending there's something big and complicated beyond the linear algebra and statistics we all studied freshman or sophomore year in engineering school behind this.