OS X Panther discussion
"OS X Panther discussion" isn't really the topic of this post. Rather, this is about Google's algorithms. Andrew Orlowski has an interesting Register article today, Blog noise achieves Google KO. He discusses a situation where several blog "TrackBack" pages fill the results of a Google search for OS X Panther Discussion.
In what must be a record, Google is - at time of writing - returning empty Trackback pages as No.1, No.2, No.3 and No.4 positions. No.5 gets you to a real web page - an Apple Insider bulletin board. Then it's back to empty Trackback pages for results No.6, No.7 and No.10. In short, Google returns blog-infested blanks for seven of the top entries.
Honestly, I think this isn't too much of a problem. I believe it's a confluence of at least three different major rules being triggered, having to do with fresh pages (some of the results are very recent), authority pages (Mac stuff, such as OS X Panther, is very popular with some well-linked bloggers), and trying to find a "best" match for all keywords. Here, in particular, the TrackBacks label themselves "Discussion", so Google is putting much weight on that word. Google's a complex system, and algorithmic oddities will happen.
Now, this post is going to trigger some of those rules as well. Sometimes the best way to make a point is to demonstrate something directly :-).
The Trackback creators are aware of the issue too, and seem to be working on fixing it.
Disclaimer: Andrew Orlowski has covered my Google writing before, most recently in "Google bug blocks thousands of sites" for my report last week:
Google Spam Filtering Gone Bad
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-spam.php
So I hope he won't be angry at me for writing this. Sigh, politics.
Update: I had the number-1 spot on Google, for a day, for those search terms. It's nice to be right :-). More significantly, I'm learning interesting bits about how the freshness rule functions. I could even see when certain search indexes were swapped out or in, as the hit-flow to my website would drop off or pick up again. The implications are staggering ...
See also the follow-up article: Emergency fixes for blog-clogged Google.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in google | on October 14, 2003 11:12 PM (Infothought permalink)
I found it on google!
?
You're number one again...
You remain at No 1 in google - perhaps finally they are giving weblogs priority over the traditional news media and "commercial" noise...
Yes, you are number one again. The point is that google algorithms have to adapt to the web comunity, no the web comunity adapt to google. This can give you a page rank penalty and google is very clear about trying to manipulate their results. So... it's a google problem, not a weblog problem.