[24x7 Exchange]

Over the weekend Google's PageRank update left a lot of web masters seriously bewildered. Nothing new there. But what is new is the reason for the confusion this time around.

I've written an article, Social Bookmarking Spam, on my Spam Filter Talk blog asking if Google may be punishing those abusing social bookmarking sites with spam articles i.e. useless or regurgitated articles with no real news just to drive traffic to their sites.

Please take a look and let me know what you think, feel free to leave comments on the blog itself.

TIA

[wecando.biz]

Bookmarking sites have a use, without that being spammed by people just trying to elevate their pagerank. It would be a shame for their contributions to sharing useful sites to be undermined by those just trying to fool Google, or Google itself in trying to fight them.

I sometimes wonder how much better the web would be without Google around.

IH

[RedEvo]

The success of social bookmarking may be more to do with link juice it creates than it being a genuinely useful tool.

As with many dishonest link building techniques (which perhaps means most link building techniques) the Google algo is catching up, it had to to survive.

d

[wecando.biz]

I am not sure the Google algo is surviving. I know we are all used to using Google to look for things, mainly out of habit, but the tosh it throws up renders it very hard work regardless of how hard they are working on the algorithm.

I've written about this on my blog in the last week. An excerpt:

"I have long been saying that Google is broken. When you want a PR company in Huddersfield and get 92,000 items back, you know it’s broken (there are only 146,000 people in Huddersfield and some of them will be children — is every adult in the town really a PR professional?). There are, in fact, no more than ten PR companies in the town and not one of them has a direct link from Page 1 of Google when you search for them. Either Google is useless and we just take it all for granted (it still has 80% of market share) or there are no SEO companies in Huddersfield helping the PR companies out (not the case: Google says there are 11,800…)."

You can read the full thing here.

What a shame now social bookmarking is now about to get written off because Google can't find a way to make it work for them.

IH

[RedEvo]

Originally Posted by wecando.biz

What a shame now social bookmarking is now about to get written off because Google can't find a way to make it work for them.

I like what you said apart from this bit. People are gaming Google and when your grass roots philosophy is to rank people based on merit, this merit being deduced from links it's a tough one.

Possibly the ONLY way to create a search engine that gives decent results would be to have it 100% human edited, but that doesn't work either, look at DMOZ.

It's a tough one and perhaps the only real answer is to have area specific human edited search engines.

d

[wecando.biz]

Originally Posted by RedEvo

I like what you said apart from this bit. People are gaming Google and when your grass roots philosophy is to rank people based on merit, this merit being deduced from links it's a tough one.

Possibly the ONLY way to create a search engine that gives decent results would be to have it 100% human edited, but that doesn't work either, look at DMOZ.

It's a tough one and perhaps the only real answer is to have area specific human edited search engines.

d

That's not impossible. What is all the content on Facebook if not human edited? A search facility tapping into your social graph is the future I reckon, as the rest of my blog went on to say.

IH

[RedEvo]

Originally Posted by wecando.biz

That's not impossible. What is all the content on Facebook if not human edited? A search facility tapping into your social graph is the future I reckon, as the rest of my blog went on to say.

IH

I'm not sure what that means, Facebook isn't a search engine....

Google is already human edited, that's what part of the search quality team do, perhaps they need a bigger team

d

[wecando.biz]

Originally Posted by RedEvo

I'm not sure what that means, Facebook isn't a search engine....

Google is already human edited, that's what part of the search quality team do, perhaps they need a bigger team

d

But it could be. There are 100 million people on it, all uploading content, making recommendations, putting links out... There is a wealth of information on it which, for what it covers, could render Google obsolete. Or to make it seem morte plausible, think of a search engine where it picks the content up from people linking out to stuff from a profile page and it using your own social graph to rate how people value that content.

That is REAL contextual search.

IH

[RedEvo]

Originally Posted by wecando.biz

But it could be. There are 100 million people on it, all uploading content, making recommendations, putting links out... There is a wealth of information on it which, for what it covers, could render Google obsolete. Or to make it seem morte plausible, think of a search engine where it picks the content up from people linking out to stuff from a profile page and it using your own social graph to rate how people value that content.

That is REAL contextual search.

IH

I don't see it.

d

[wecando.biz]

Originally Posted by RedEvo

I don't see it.

d

I know what you mean RedEvo, but hat is because when looking for places to go on the web you are perhaps thinking still of a model practiced by Google, Ask, Live Seach, AOL and others.

Try not using Google search for a day. Use your bookmarks, links you get on Facebook, links in Twitter and see how many new people and companies you "touch" through news articles, blog posts, forum posts, social networks.

You'll see it's not hard to live without Google Search and you may just have increased your knowledge more than you would have done going to Google for stuff you wanted and then picking through pages of rubbish for the stuff you expected to see.

One of the few aspects of the web that hasn't moved on a jot over the past 10 years is search. It's horribly outdated. But there is a sub-class of people on the web who have build a network of contacts online now and if they want to know about something, they ask their network and get much higher queality information back almost instantly. Certainly the delta between asking and getting is one where no work is required, so you can do a real job in between rather than have to make sense of Google's results.

We are not there yet where everyone is doing this of course, mainly because there are many disjointed services rather than one place you can get all you need, but it's coming along.

IH