Orlowski influence on BBC article?
So there's an article over at the BBC at the moment about Google celebrating its fifth birthday. As part of this article there's this paragraph:
Web logs, or blogs, pose a particular problem for Google as one of their defining features is the links they have to other blogs. As the numbers of blogs has grown the influence they have over rankings has increased. In some cases blogs referring to a webpage on a particular subject are ranked higher than the page itself. To combat this Google has considered creating an index just for the web journals.
My question is quite simple, really. The possibility that weblogs might be skewing the Google's results has been mentioned several times before, but as far as I know Google have never come out and confirmed these stories - and they have actively denied that a potential 'separate index' would involve removing weblog from their main index. So my concern is not what Google may or may not be doing, but whether the BBC has just based that part of its article on the article written by Andrew Orlowski on this issue, which conjured a fair amount of spurious fantasy and assertion out of surprisingly limited evidence. If they have, I have to confess I'd be disappointed...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Chill Mr Tom. You get rattled at any article that doubts the power of the blog.
→ Posted by: GarnetPoint at September 8, 2003 12:12 AM
Nope - nothing to do with that. I do know weblogs pretty well, and I do get irritable when people make the same mistakes over and over, but this one is just a plain question - do they have separate confirmation on this one (in which case that's really interesting, and we should investigate it further) or is it based upon Orlowski's article, in which case it's hardly 'three independent sources' and I'm a bit disappointed in the BBC. Either's fine as an answer.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at September 8, 2003 12:26 AM
Fair enough. But, they really should do something to mitigate/contain/properly weight the impact of blogs. Google is definitely less useful* than it was two years ago.
*Anecdotal: personal experience.
→ Posted by: Stewart Butterfield at September 8, 2003 12:51 AM
I wonder, though, how they would go about segregating blogs. The lines between "blog" and "not-blog" are very fuzzy. How would they classify something like my courseware, for example, which runs on Movable Type but contains all of my course-related information (syllabus, readings, etc)? Would it be only those blogs that are on hosted systems, like blogspot and typepad and livejournal? Anything that has a blog-like logo or "powered by" link? This is treacherous ground. (Ceci n'est pas une blog...)
→ Posted by: Liz at September 8, 2003 1:59 AM
Seems like I remember a recent study where someone at a US university actually had people run hundreds of queries, and found that the actual incidence of (obviously) weblog-based results was quite small. Need to find that...
→ Posted by: Liz at September 8, 2003 2:11 AM
(Blogs are shite until someone can build a system that ACTUALLY REMEMBERS PERSONAL INFO.)
But anyway - it is easy now Liz: they have a live DB (Blogger's) with more than enough of a sample size to see what Bloggers are pointing to. They don't need to anaylze every single blog, just the 300,000 (or whatever number of active Blogger blogs there are) they have immediate access to.
→ Posted by: Stewart Butterfield at September 8, 2003 2:11 AM
Brad Choate has posted a fix for the "remember me" problem (it's related to the year/month/day archiving thing, and the way the cookies are set). As to the Blogger thing, I thought the idea was to separate blogs from the "real pages," not just to analyze blog links. (Though I think either one is problematic, since blogger isn't necessarily representative of the larger world of "blogs.")
→ Posted by: Liz at September 8, 2003 2:28 AM
So, if this is true (which we currently don't know due to questionable reporting--which I believe is Tom's point) does it mean that Google is changing the definition of what a search engine is? Isn't a web search engine supposed to search web pages? Blogs certainly fall into that category. And given the loose definition of what a blog is, how would Google go about defining exactly what their main index includes?
→ Posted by: jazer at September 8, 2003 3:38 AM
Whether or not Google has confirmed it, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Google's weighting of blog posts leaves something to be desired.
For example, on August 30 I made a short post about Arnold Schwarzenegger and the 1997 Oui interview. This is presently the #1 result for the search "Arnold Oui" on Google. I've had hundreds of visitors because of this one post, which certainly was not the definive source for information about the Arnold Oui interview.
So whether Google admit it or not, they do have a problem. I don't think the solution is to segregate blogs from other websites - the dividing line is too grey, rather, I think a change to the weighting scheme is in order.
Ole
→ Posted by: Ole Eichhorn at September 8, 2003 5:14 AM
On the other hand, for a number of topics blog posts are a better resource of information as they collect the best content from the web. It's a lot better often to find a usefull blog post than to have to deal with a 100K results from google or dmoz.
→ Posted by: KO at September 8, 2003 7:14 AM
I have to say that personally I haven't noticed much of a problem around this stuff. At worst people click on a weblog post that then gives them a link directly to what they're looking for. Wasn't there a Microcontent News piece on Google and Weblogging a while ago that didn't find weblogs in the index a problem?
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at September 8, 2003 8:35 AM
Ditto. Blog posts tend to be better jumping-off points for net research than "real web pages" (whatever the hell those are).
→ Posted by: jazer at September 8, 2003 5:05 PM
I wrote a little piece on this a while back (Trackbacks considered harmful: http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000079.html). As far as I can see, the main complaint must be concerning the use (of some bloggers) of trackbacks. The fact is that google rates a page as being more important when more people link to it. Now if I blog what effectively amounts to a 'aint this page great' type link then I inflate the importance of that page in googles eyes. As far as I'm concerned this is perfectly ok - I found the link useful. What is NOT useful, is that if I then ping this site the site I ping will typically create a URL back to my site (this is how movable type works by default), artifically inflating the importance of my post.
To be honest, until I see a decent study on this I'm not that bothered - anecdotal evidence is just that and is devoid of any scientific merit.
→ Posted by: Sam Newman at September 8, 2003 11:08 PM
Surely the problem with Google isn't the blog posts but the content-free Orlowski/Billblog rantings and commercial crap. I'd prefer a commerce-free Google to a blog-free Google any day.
→ Posted by: Tom Morris at September 9, 2003 9:55 PM
It seems to me that Google is not as effective as it could be at "understanding" blogs because it does not understand "permalinks." If this were rectified then surely results would be improved, as they pertain to blogs at least.
→ Posted by: filchyboy at September 12, 2003 2:14 AM
Well - is that true? I mean - it clearly is true to an extent - but if people all used individual archives or day archives, then the whole permalink issue would be less of a worry, I suspect...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at September 13, 2003 11:19 AM