{"id":282624,"date":"2011-02-26T08:33:55","date_gmt":"2011-02-26T08:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/02\/26\/google-changes-formula-to-catch-cheating-websites\/"},"modified":"2011-02-26T08:33:55","modified_gmt":"2011-02-26T08:33:55","slug":"google-changes-formula-to-catch-cheating-websites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/02\/26\/google-changes-formula-to-catch-cheating-websites\/","title":{"rendered":"Google changes formula to catch cheating websites"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You Are Here: Home<\/a> \u00bb Africa\/International<\/a> \u00bb Google changes formula to catch cheating websites<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t \tPage last updated at Saturday, February 26, 2011 8:08 AM \/\/ <\/span>\n\t\t\t <\/div>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Google Inc., long considered the gold standard of Internet search, is changing the secret formula it uses to rank Web pages as it struggles to combat websites that have been able to game its system.<\/p>\n

The Internet giant, which handles nearly two-thirds of the world\u2019s Web searches, has been under fire recently over the quality of its results. Google said it changed its mathematical formula late Thursday in order to better weed out \u201clow-quality\u201d sites that offer users little value. Some such sites offer just enough content to appear in search results and lure users to pages loaded with advertisements.<\/p>\n

Google generates billions of dollars from advertising linked to its search engine, whose influence as a front door to the world\u2019s online content and commerce continues to grow by the year. Google\u2019s power over the fortunes of so many other companies has made it a target of competitor complaints. It has also faced government investigations, including scrutiny by regulators in the U.S. and Europe.<\/p>\n

The Silicon Valley company built its business on the strength of algorithms that yield speedy results. The company constantly refines those formulas, and sometimes takes manual action to penalize companies that it believes use tricks to artificially rise in search rankings. In recent weeks, it has cracked down on retailers J.C. Penney Co. and Overstock.com Inc.<\/p>\n

Last month, Google acknowledged it \u201ccan and should do better\u201d to beat back sites that \u201ccopy content from other websites\u201d or provide information that is \u201cjust not very useful\u201d but are ranked highly anyway.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never seen Google be attacked on the relevancy of their results the way they have these past couple of months,\u201d said Danny Sullivan, editor of a widely read blog about the field called Search Engine Land.<\/p>\n

The debate about Google\u2019s results was sparked by a recent blog post by Vivek Wadhwa, a former technology executive and a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley. He wrote that his students had trouble finding basic information about the founders of start-up companies on Google.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam,\u201d or of little use, he wrote. \u201cGoogle has become a jungle.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Friday, Mr. Wadhwa said in an interview that he had previously \u201cwritten Google off\u201d but is now \u201coptimistic they may well get this under control,\u201d though it will take time to see whether there are improvements. \u201cIt\u2019s not rocket science; they know who the bad guys are, they compensate the companies\u201d by letting them post Google ads and share revenue, he said.<\/p>\n

Google search engineer Amit Singhal said in an interview that the company added numerous \u201csignals,\u201d or factors it would incorporate into its algorithm. Among those signals are \u201chow users interact with\u201d a site.<\/p>\n

It also used feedback from hundreds of people it regularly hires to evaluate changes. These \u201chuman raters\u201d were asked to look at search results and decide whether they would give their credit card number to a site or follow its medical advice, Mr. Singhal said.<\/p>\n

On Thursday night, Mr. Singhal and a colleague wrote in a blog post that most of the changes would be \u201cso subtle that very few people notice them\u201d but \u201cit\u2019s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results.\u201d<\/p>\n

About 12% of U.S.-based queries would be affected by the change, Google said, and the changes would expand to non-U.S. users in the near future.<\/p>\n

Google didn\u2019t give examples of Web pages that rose or dropped in its rankings for certain queries, setting off a wave of speculation by professionals whose job it is to help sites rise in Google\u2019s results.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down,\u201d the Google engineers wrote, adding that sites with original content \u201csuch as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on\u201d will move up.<\/p>\n

Many sites rely on Web traffic from Google, and even a small drop in the rankings could have a large impact and potentially reduce revenue. On Friday some large content creators, such as HubPages.com and ChaCha.com, said they noticed significant changes to traffic for some of their pages.<\/p>\n

Demand Media Inc., which recently went public and runs large content sites such as eHow.com and Answerbag.com, said \u201cwe haven\u2019t seen a material net impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Sullivan, the blogger, said an eHow page with what he characterized as \u201cshallow\u201d content previously appeared as the first Google search result when users searched \u201chow to get pregnant fast.\u201d Since Google\u2019s change Thursday, the eHow page has dropped out of the top results.<\/p>\n

Thursday\u2019s move was an example of Google\u2019s tremendous influence over the Web, which has drawn scrutiny from U.S. and overseas governments that have launched probes to see whether it is involved in anticompetitive behavior. More recently, some websites have complained that Google is placing links to its own services ahead of Google\u2019s competitors.<\/p>\n

Google says it acts in the best interest of users, and frustration by some sites is understandable.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle has an enormous amount of power to make or break businesses,\u201d said Scott Jones, chief executive of ChaCha Search Inc., a question-and-answer site, who said he was seeing some negative effects from Thursday\u2019s algorithm change, especially for Web pages on his site that have short, \u201cbite-sized\u201d content.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s unfair, I think, that Google made some wide, paint-brush decisions here in their algorithm that didn\u2019t take into account a site like ChaCha that does have unique content created at fairly high cost,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Paul Edmondson, chief executive of HubPages.com, which shares ad revenue with writers that publish Web content about a variety of topics from making scarves to Mexico\u2019s Day of the Dead holiday, said it was too early to tell how his site, would fare under the changes.<\/p>\n

Web traffic sent by Google to a HubPages article about nose piercing rose by 40% since yesterday, he said, while traffic to an article on \u201cwhat happens if you abandon your home and let it foreclose\u201d dropped by 80%.<\/p>\n

Google said the effort that resulted in the latest search change has been underway for about a year. In order to learn which sites users find to be of poor quality, Google earlier this month began offering software for its Chrome browser that allows users to block sites from their search results if they deem them to be low quality.<\/p>\n

Once blocked, the sites won\u2019t appear during future searches. Google on Thursday said that while it didn\u2019t use data from the experiment to influence the changes it made to its algorithm, it found that the algorithm change covered 84% of the Internet sites that were the \u201cmost-blocked\u201d by users.<\/p>\n

One new competitor to Google, start-up search engine Blekko, relies on its users to weed out what they believe are poor sites in categories such as health, cars and personal finance.<\/p>\n

\u201cOverall Google has done a great job and there are very few cracks in the system,\u201d said Seth Besmertnik, chief executive of Conductor Inc., a company that helps companies such as General Electric Co. and Federal Express rank highly on search engines. \u201cBut spammers are getting smarter and Google needs to keep getting smarter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source: WSJ<\/a><\/p>\n

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