[thelist] RE: Cheating Google?

Wesley Mason wes at pmason.karoo.co.uk
Tue Dec 23 05:38:37 CST 2003


On 23 Dec 2003, at 04:29, Eric E wrote:

>> not sure most SE's are capable of understanding link
>> context to great extent either.
>
> Actually, the simplicity of the contextual link is it's beauty.
>
> You have 50 sites with decent ranking for "automobile research" (by
> themselves) linking to edmunds.com - that's a tip-off that something is
> up with edmunds.com. A crawl of edmunds.com reveals that there is good
> and plentiful text on "automobile research" so edmunds.com get's a gold
> star. Edmunds.com links to another site and that site bascially rides 
> on
> edmunds.com coat-tails (from a linking perspective) and it too has good
> text then that site will do pretty well. Think of it as a pyramid.

Ahh, I wasn't even thinking about context via the data on the page 
that's actually being linked, a very eloquent algorithm indeed.

>
>> On another note, like many, it is getting increasingly more difficult
>> to hit the mark using Google these days (more accurate when searching
>> for technology/geek related subjects, less for anything else), due
>> greatly to the extreme amount of link/search spamming going on (about
>> 90% of my searches within the last 48 hours have resulted in pages of
>> results of spam sites, merely packed with keywords and irrelevant
>> information trying to lead me to an unrelated product of some
>> variety).
>
> Yep. If you think of all the people trying to employ all the tricks,
> it's a wonder the SE's do as well as they do.
>
> It will be interesting to see what 3rd generation search can do with
> turning statistics on actual user behavior (i.e. whether a user comes
> back to search results from a site on the results page, and if so, how
> soon after they left) to attribute rankings.
>
> Pax,
> Eric
>

I've often wondered this myself, a great deal of "hype" is being placed 
on personalized searching, narrowing and filtering results to the 
specifications of the individual, which of course relies on the user 
returning and keeping their previous settings; this is an area Google 
has a lot of potential to branch into merely because of their extremely 
large *returning* user-base, which also correlates with their (not so 
now) recent acquisition of a company that specializes in such search 
technology.

--
Wesley Aaron Mason
(1st Vamp)
Weblog from nowhere: http://1stvamp.org/
Webcomic from somewhere: http://gfbowl.com/



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