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| <<<>>> |
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The Corruption of Electronic Information : Part 1 |
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| Created by Decius at
| [+ favourites]
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Originally, one would think this refers to the effect of the political machine on information. Although this phenomenon is most certainly true, most information activists are already overwhelmed by the flood of misguided propaganda being distributed. Therefore, one more article pointing out what we all already know and cry silently about is redundant.
The culprit in this unfortunate premonition of doom is Google. The evolution of Google as a search engine can be described as a battle between webmasters who hope to conquer their search algorithm and the Google engineers that want to keep their listings as "natural" and unmolested as possible. Specifically, Google wants the top ten results for "baby diapers" to be the top ten sites that society considers the most relevant informational resources on "baby diapers".
The underlined statement is worded carefully and is an accurate synopsis of the way the Google search ranking algorithm works as agreed upon by almost everyone in the field. Over the years, it has become apparent that one cannot trust webmasters to accurately place the importance of their website for the good of the customer. All webmasters with good sites and bad sites want to be represented at the top for as many keywords as possible, regardless of relevancy.
As time progressed, Google took steps to prevent the manipulation of their search results. They stopped relying on the information on webmaster's pages because many websites would saturate their page in keywords that they want to be targeted for regardless of whether they should. Google began banning websites that had hidden text (text that is the same color as the background) and implemented a host of "filters" that were meant to weed out sites that were "spammy".
One of the biggest differences between Google and other search engines (which is why they initially had much more relevant results) is that they created the concept of "Page rank". Page rank is almost entirely determined by the number of other websites that link to you. The more websites that link to you, the higher your page rank. The higher your page rank, the higher you would appear on Google search pages for keywords. In addition to using the content on your page to determine these keywords, they began giving weight to the keywords used to link to you. So if a million websites linked to you using the keyword "shirts", you would have a high ranking for the word "shirts" even if it only appeared once on your page (or not at all).
The way page rank worked was that the higher a site's page rank was, the higher the link they placed on it was. If you had a page with low page rank, links from your site were almost meaningless.
In Spring of 2004 Google created a new filter called the "sandbox". The "sandbox" is held by many webmasters as the beginning of the downfall of Google. The sandbox was a group that all "untrusted" sites were put in. Almost like a penalization, sites that were sandboxed ranked very poorly for almost any keyword. The problem with the sandbox is that the definition of untrusted, according to Google, was "new".
From Spring of 2004 onwards, any new sites created and published by webmasters, genuine or not, were automatically untrusted. Any incoming links that pointed to these sites, as well as the content on those sites were automatically demoted and worth less than if the identical situation occurred on a site only a year older. |
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| Created by Decius at
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