2007-01-30 16:34:02
The Google ups, and the Google downs
Google came as a revolution to information search, they taught us that information from 8 billion pages could be scanned in a millisecond, and showed us that information was free for all. However, Google also became the first Search Engine to clearly give preferential treatment to authority sites, mostly universities and American government pages.
One of the most basic factors determining how authoritative a site is considered being, is the age of the site. This is quite logical – an old site has more factors for Google to look in to, and a larger mass of events to base statistical calculations on.
The process when a site gets older is often, in the SEO business, referred to as “ageing”.
Every day, young brilliant students publish their work on the internet, perhaps describing their progress in a blogg. However, searching their topics will more likely return some old university course schedule, than their interesting texts.
This is obviously a very large problem, and from this massive, massive span of texts and sites, we’re limited to a very small set of sites, which are considered very authoritative, and the huge multitude of sites are filtered down to a fraction.
That these authority filters could be switched off, to enable searches for smaller and less popular sites in a highly populated topic, but that is not the case.
Even before you hit that search button, Google has already decided what pages are most important, and if any of those pages get a decent hit for the keywords you used, they will populate your search result like no tomorrow.
Of course, the above problems aren’t caused by Google for now reason. As I mentioned in the beginning of this text, Google HAS revolutionized the way we find information on the Internet. One of the tools used for providing us the results are the authority filters. One could almost agree with Google that information on university sites have a higher average quality than the information on a regular, privately owned site.
The majority of searchers don’t even think about how the results are ordered in the result pages, they are just happy that they don’t see most of the spamming pages they so frequently saw in altavista.
But my main point with this post is to focus on that there are actually some serious concession to Google and the new era of complex search engines. Search results are filtered by generalized filters, created to disable unusual sites from ranking well.
A quick example:
The government sites are a hugely authoritative on the Internet, any site they link to will get a tremendous boost in rank.
What if, the government would link to 10 Iraqi war supporter pages, with the link text “Iraqi war”?
Suddenly, the government has a very large role in deciding what you find on the Internet. They can link to sites stating that the government’s causes are the right ones, to make sure that the uncertain searchers will only hear their point of view, or at least most of them.
In an attempt to illustrate this problem, the US government site was linked to with the link text “miserable failure”.
The results can be seen in the below image:
Since this post, Google has edited the result page for the term, se comments: Google political bias
For one, Google could allow searchers to disable the authority factor “at their own risk” – to make sure the diversity of the Internet is kept intact.
Sadly, there aren’t any really satisfying solutions to the problem, except perhaps working on better algorithms, more topic-oriented filters, and smarter spam filters.
However, obviously this is a slow process – no matter if you have a couple of hundred PhDs on your pay roll, or not.
For Google, the internet is a hostile environment, their job is to find the needle in a haystack containing of billions of pages. Every day, millions of pages are created by semi-spammers, with the sole purpose to get placements in the search engine result pages, and drive traffic for which to display advertisement. Google needs to filter these, and the authority factor is a very efficient way. But do we really have to choose between great multitude and great quality, and for how long?
Young vs. Old
One of the most basic factors determining how authoritative a site is considered being, is the age of the site. This is quite logical – an old site has more factors for Google to look in to, and a larger mass of events to base statistical calculations on.
The process when a site gets older is often, in the SEO business, referred to as “ageing”.
Every day, young brilliant students publish their work on the internet, perhaps describing their progress in a blogg. However, searching their topics will more likely return some old university course schedule, than their interesting texts.
This is obviously a very large problem, and from this massive, massive span of texts and sites, we’re limited to a very small set of sites, which are considered very authoritative, and the huge multitude of sites are filtered down to a fraction.
One would think…
That these authority filters could be switched off, to enable searches for smaller and less popular sites in a highly populated topic, but that is not the case.
Even before you hit that search button, Google has already decided what pages are most important, and if any of those pages get a decent hit for the keywords you used, they will populate your search result like no tomorrow.
Google’s point of view
Of course, the above problems aren’t caused by Google for now reason. As I mentioned in the beginning of this text, Google HAS revolutionized the way we find information on the Internet. One of the tools used for providing us the results are the authority filters. One could almost agree with Google that information on university sites have a higher average quality than the information on a regular, privately owned site.
The majority of searchers don’t even think about how the results are ordered in the result pages, they are just happy that they don’t see most of the spamming pages they so frequently saw in altavista.
But my main point with this post is to focus on that there are actually some serious concession to Google and the new era of complex search engines. Search results are filtered by generalized filters, created to disable unusual sites from ranking well.
A quick example:
The government sites are a hugely authoritative on the Internet, any site they link to will get a tremendous boost in rank.
What if, the government would link to 10 Iraqi war supporter pages, with the link text “Iraqi war”?
Suddenly, the government has a very large role in deciding what you find on the Internet. They can link to sites stating that the government’s causes are the right ones, to make sure that the uncertain searchers will only hear their point of view, or at least most of them.
In an attempt to illustrate this problem, the US government site was linked to with the link text “miserable failure”.
The results can be seen in the below image:
Since this post, Google has edited the result page for the term, se comments: Google political bias
What can be done?
For one, Google could allow searchers to disable the authority factor “at their own risk” – to make sure the diversity of the Internet is kept intact.
Sadly, there aren’t any really satisfying solutions to the problem, except perhaps working on better algorithms, more topic-oriented filters, and smarter spam filters.
However, obviously this is a slow process – no matter if you have a couple of hundred PhDs on your pay roll, or not.
For Google, the internet is a hostile environment, their job is to find the needle in a haystack containing of billions of pages. Every day, millions of pages are created by semi-spammers, with the sole purpose to get placements in the search engine result pages, and drive traffic for which to display advertisement. Google needs to filter these, and the authority factor is a very efficient way. But do we really have to choose between great multitude and great quality, and for how long?
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