Silence is the virtue of fools - Francis Bacon
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Google changes its search algorithm
SEARCH GIANT Google has made changes to its search algorithms in an attempt to lower the rankings of content aggregator websites.
Google made the algorithmic announcement on its blog yesterday and said that the change is significant. However, it is only designed to target low value websites that copy content from other websites.
Google claimed the change should only affect 11.8 per cent of queries and said better websites will get higher rankings.
"We can't make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites," blogged Google Fellow Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts.
"If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84 [per cent] of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits," they added.
So everyone's happy, right? Well not the content farms that aggregate information. Most of those websites tend to be travel companies and Google has already landed itself in a legal quagmire for alleged search bias by lowering the ranking of such companies.
Google has been dragged into several anti-competitive lawsuits filed by travel companies recently. The INQURIER reported in December that travel website Tripadvisor filed a claim against Google for demoting its search rankings.
Google has also been charged with competitive abuse for search bias by several smaller companies. Worthpoint, Mytriggers, Foundem, Tradecmet and Sourcetool are all at varying legal stages with Google after accusing it of search bias.
Amidst the accusations, last week Google refused to reveal if it had complied with a US anti-trust review of complaints about anti-competitive search rankings.
Google's search algorithm change is effective in the US now but will be rolling out elsewhere over time. µ
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The problem is people selling items tend to repost the same exact information. Cut and Paste on Real Estate and Classified sites. The bad for them is un and coming sites will be demoted through this. Im all for getting rid of spam but I think a more personal ranking system would be better than bots.
I hope Google continues to demote this plague of content aggregator sites, as well as other such useless sites. Vertical search sites can go too; I'll seek them out directly if I want them. It pissed me off to no end to click on a search result only to find out it's some damn collection of forum posts retrieved from other forums, and yet never actually containing any of the content of the originals.
I hope the content aggregators are really pissed, and if they go bankrupt, GOOD RIDDANCE. They need to extend this policy to Experts Exchange as well as those damn Wikipedia mirrors. We don't need 5 copies of wikipedia articles strewn around the net. TheFreeDictionary can go too, with its 95% page spam.
Google is in the business of selling advertising. They dont want to promote spam for free.
Google customers have paid good money to have their keywords upranked. So they dont want it to happen.
Meanwhile, Google users expect useful search results. So they dont want it either.
So: is there a precedent whereby a corporation is required by law to give away its product or service for free against the wishes of its shareholders, its paying customers and most of its users?
Or are these results spammers merely being their evil, sleazy, scumsucking, parasitical, verminous selves again?
Content aggregation sites are nothing more than search SPAM.
I hate them ...
No one can tell how Google should rank its results. If they have bias, it is because they want to make money with it somehow.
Google is not a public thing and Google is not the Internet itself. Google is a private company that naturally wants to make money. Its services are mostly free and no one is forced to use them.
There aren't much ways of making money with a free service, and if you reduce the options even more, I guess this people don't know a damn thing about business.