Around the Net
Google: Rank Just Our 'Opinion,' Man
- The New York Times et al., Thursday, December 2, 2010 1:18 PM
Some experts questioned the effectiveness of such a strategy, but Google -- having recently embarked on a crusade to woo local businesses and online shoppers -- took the implications seriously.
Late Wednesday, the search giant said it changed the way it ranks search results so that, according to The New York Times, "unscrupulous merchants would find it harder to appear prominently in searches."
"Too bad," writes Gawker. "This loophole would have made online shopping way more interesting."
In a blog post titled "Being bad to your customers is bad for your business," Google fellow Amit Singhal said the company revised its algorithm to discourage online merchants that, in its "opinion," provide extremely poor user experience.
Picking up on Google's use of the word "opinion," Federated Media founder and author John Battelle writes: "If ever there was an argument that algorithms are subjective, there it is."
According to the Guardian, the story shows that Google search -- dominant though it may be -- is
still a work in progress. "It also points to the growing importance of social search, where
you find things through what people really recommend -- not just what they link to."
Econsultancy.com calls the change a "knee jerk reaction" to The Times story, and, as its understands that Google will now rank search results by public opinion, writes: "The web is too big for opinion based search engines. That is Yahoo pre-2000 theory."
Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan -- quoted in The Times' original story over the weekend -- suspects that Google is now incorporating merchant reviews into its search algorithm. While unconfirmed by Google, Sullivan notes: "That doesn't mean reviews necessarily override all other ranking signals but rather that they are yet another factor among many to be considered."
