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Google's Personal Blocklist Extension for Chrome - The Beginnings of Social Search?
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Google just announced some allegedly major changes to the algorithm affecting some 11% of search results. The purpose? To punish spammy web content farms. Between the lines, Google is also beginning to experiment with social search.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: February 25, 2011
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Contents:
Algorithms Come, Algorithms Go
On February 24, Google made a major announcement of a change to the search algorithm, designed to 'punish' content farms and push 'spammy' web content down, or off, the search results list.
But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, 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.
http://bit.ly/eUgzsY
Google has taken a lot of heat lately on its search results. The most visible target of this action is Demand Media which publishes the popular (and spamm?) eHow series. The deeper point is that Google is frustrated (as are users) with the plethora of spammy junk on the Internet that clogs Google results with low quality content.
Personal Blocklist Extension for Chrome
Google is like the Kremlin in Moscow, or the dictatorship of North Korea. I always try to read between the lines. What are they really thinking? What is the difference between the public spin and the deeper reality? Interestingly in the blog post, Google writes:
It’s worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we’ve received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.
Heretofore, you could vote 'for' a website by giving it a link. Google now seems to be moving in the direction in which you can vote 'against' a website by using the Chrome extension. How soon is it before armies of inexpensive laborers in the third world are hired to download Chrome and click against competitors? The arms race begins...
So we have the beginnings of social search here. Google harnessing the hearts and minds of Chrome users to give it, yet more feedback, on their web searches. Privacy? Not so much.
The Beginnings of Social Search?
What will Social Search look like? We are already seeing its beginnings... Both Google and Bing heavily index Twitter, and are trying (desperately) to penetrate Facebook. Shared links no doubt count, as do social bookmarking sites and sites like Digg. With the Chrome extension, Google clearly sees the value of having its own dominant browser, as does Microsoft. Why Microsoft hasn't harnessed Internet Explorer to improve Bing is beyond anyone's guess...
Social search is coming and will come. It may, ultimately, come from Facebook but not from Google but it will come. Get ready!
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