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Blog Noise "Life or Death" for Google
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posted by scubacuda
on Saturday June 07, @11:02AM
from the blogito-ergo-cogito dept.
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The Register: "Blog noise" is affecting Google search results. (Google's current search algorithm gives the small percentage of bloggers in the population what many consider a "disproportionate weight" to their sites.) One of the more most popular solutions is that Google implement a -noblog flag - that would return search results without this "noise."
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Blog Noise "Life or Death" for Google
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The Fine Print:
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Sunday June 08, @05:17AM (#767)
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Damn I hate that word. Blog. Its a word thats easy to hate, such an ugly thing. Weblog, much nicer.
Look,t his entire thing is rediculous. There is as much pertient information in weblogs as there is in the rest of the vast quantity that is the web. Damnit, go search for "laptop". What do you get? do you get relevant and insightful information on what a laptop is? erm, no.
At the time of searching, we have a site about putting linux on a laptop, we have a shopping site selling laptops, more linux, more sales, erm, more sales, gosh, more sales.
The internet is not commerce! how DARE these laptop sales places co-opt the rightful place of useful information within the search engine! and that linux stuff! DIE!. Yes, if google does not implement a filter removing all shopping sites from its results by default, then it will soon become defunct! like altavista!
No you idiot. Some people, want information that comes from shopping sites. Some people, want information that comes from a weblog.
Let me give you a pertinent example. A couple of weeks ago, I was attempting to build a client-side application using XML, XSL and Javascript on the mozilla platform. In a blogless world, I would have been screwed. The amount of documentation out there for this kind of thing is *miniscule*. What is implemented? how is it done? CAN I GET A DAMN EXAMPLE PLEASE?
To the rescue? amoung the source code, short documents, microsoft equivalents, w3c standards etc that I was reading, the site http://www.zoode.org/b2/index.php?p=30&c=1 came to my rescue. At last, a working example and some useful links. Don't take my word for it, go there, check out the comments left by others even.
You're going to take that away from me? You think that blogging is nothing but people talking about their lives? I'll tell you something, blogging, is nothing but people talking about their lives. The lives they live, in the same world as you, doing many of the same things you do, trying to solve many of the same problems you are.
You're going to throw this away? do you think for a second that weblogging is going to remain forever the presence of kids with too much time on their hands and nothing serious to say? you're fooling yourself. Removing the "weblog" community from the results of the search will cut out maybe 10% of the information you're trying to find right now.
I don't have a weblog, I tried but I really couldn't do anything useful with the format except the occasional tutorial. Then my weblog software locked me out and I've never been bothered trying to reset the password. That doesn't mean I don't recognise a valuable source of information when I see one.
There are no cheap answers to search optimisation, don't go scapegoating the latest craze just because there aren't many people doing serious work in the field yet. It'll get there, it'll be worthwhile, and when that happens, we'll all be bitching about how google should stop indexing sms chat sessions or something because they're "nothing but noise and narsi..narci..dictionary.com here I come"
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Agreed.
The key insight to Google's search algorithm can be stated as follows: Human edited lists of top sites will easily beat out some sort of keyword based approach. But you can't hire hundreds of thounsands of people to index the web continually. What you CAN do is leverage the hundreds of thousands of people out there who are creating web pages. Thus the algorithm based on number of links a site gets (with many corrections for "quality" of links as well).
But this only works if there are hundreds of thousands of people out there writing web pages, particularly pages that link to those things these people find important. Rather than a DANGER to Google, the blogging community is the true SAVIOR of its search algorithm. Folks who try googlebombing games (the blogging equivalent of script kiddies) will soon be swamped in the sea of individuals linking to sites they actually find important and useful. And THAT will improve Google's search quality even more.
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Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be
lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
- Isaac Asimov
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