Google changes its search engine

Google has been continually improving its algorithms over the years to improve search results for users.  It recently changed with Google Blog's February 24th post, stating, "We launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking – a change that noticeably impacts 11.8 percent of our queries." By doing so Google hopes to reduce the amount of spam and content farmers that appear on search results.

For those unfamiliar with the terms, a search algorithm is the method in which a search engine (like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask) judges how useful a site is to the user searching.  There are many methods an engine can use to search a website.  One is by using ‘crawlers' or ‘spiders' (a great pun on the World Wide Web) to search through the web first, then show the results to the user.  Another is by using a human-powered directory, in which a webmaster submits his own description of his site, and then the search engine browses the site if the user's query matches the descriptive data.

Sadly, some people take advantage of the way an engine collects data to make their sites appear higher up on search results.  For example, JC Penney recently used link farms (a form of spamming a search engine by hyperlinking a group of websites to other sites in the group) to boost their ranking.  A study at Cornell University in 2006 on the distribution of clicks on a Google page showed that people picked the first search result on their page more than 56% of the time.  As such, a higher ranking for your site directly affects how much traffic you get, and this can be exceptionally useful for commercial websites.

Many other websites also pay writers to write articles packed full with popular keywords, so that Google deems them ‘useful' and their site scales up even higher on the Google's result page.

This is where Google's improved algorithm, known as "Farmer," comes in.  The algorithm is designed to "reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites [that] copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites – sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis, and so on."

Unfortunately, as Google tries to weed out spam websites, it also occasionally weeds out useful ones.  Google's online forum is riddled with furious webmasters who have been negatively affected by Google's ‘improvement.'  Dani Horowitz, the creator of the IT forum DaniWeb, recently stated, "We lost over half our US traffic, and we're a discussion forum with an editorial side.  Our content is 100% unique."  Dani noted that the ‘farmer' algorithm has only been released in the United States so far, so if it is implemented worldwide the website could take an even heavier blow.

This is a problem that will continue to haunt Google's results and reputation.  As Google Fellow Amit Singhal states, "No algorithm is 100 percent accurate.  Therefore any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm…we make note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent."