Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Is Google Doing Evil?

I just watched a documentary on Google, on Google's documentary website - see the previous post.

In the documentary, there was brief discussion of how a page is ranked. Step one, who links to it, valued in numbers and quality. Step two, how important is who links to it in terms of "quality," in other words, who links to the site that links to the first site. More links and more important links, increases the value of the links, driving up the rank at each level.

There's more to it; but, if a search query gives you the most "popular" result, are you getting an accurate result? An authoritative result? All of the authoritative results?

Does the imperative of popularity obscure information?

In practice, I don't think it does. Google does an amazing job of finding me what I'm looking for. But, as I am happy with what I am finding in those first few results, am I missing relevant information that is buried a page or two down, or not shown because it isn't popular enough in Google's algorithm?

3 comments:

Ryan said...

There seems to be some conflicting views on how google 'ranks' your page. I understand the linking business to a certain degree, however, there are present and past google employee's that claim linking plays a small part in page ranking. All of these employee's prefer to tell us this under the alias of "anonymous" so....

I don't really have a clue.

I just read my comment and find it odd that even though I knew I didn't know the answer to the large question - I still commented anyways.

I need to re-evaluate my life.

Dave said...

I think it has to do with climbing the mountain because it's there. See post, post comment. Something like that.

Anonymous said...

I've commented on questionable Google practices often enough over at Blognonymous, but I don't count their page ranking among them. Sometimes even the "little guy's page" rises to the top.

The Google initiative to turn on your computer's built in mic and serve you ads based on what is "heard" in the background...now that's evil.