The Register: Google explains new page rankings. On page two, the web developer who on page one describes the new index as ’seriously degraded’ after his own online journal fell from first to sixth in the Google rankings, admits the old index was ‘probably not fair.’
This is so full of shit. I am that web developer, and my original post clearly states (and proves) that Google’s search engine results were degraded on specific non-blogging-related searches: spam sites, generic portal pages, blank pages, and even 404 page-not-found pages were showing up in the top 10 search results. 404 pages! Jesus, even a fifth grader with a Visual Basic crawler could filter those out. Something went seriously awry with this update, and it had nothing to do with bloggers. This has been confirmed by other Wired readers and many professional Google-watchers (more commentary here).
To be fair, as I noted two days later, Google engineers appear to be hard at work correcting these problems. Some of the crap search results I got on October 3 were fixed by October 5. However, I am still able to reproduce the problem with the reservation hotel search: the #1 search result is a completely blank page. I’ve archived the search results as they appear today.
I’m sure the blogger with a bruised ego
angle plays well in the high echelons of the public relations circuit, and I’m sure Google’s PR department was shitting bricks when this story hit just as they were renewing their long-term contract with Yahoo, but please, spare me. It’s an engineering problem; only your engineers can fix it.
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