Monday, November 3, 2008

Google Bias Take 2

I earlier posted that Google's ranking of search results caused a rich-get-richer problem. In other words sites linked to most often will be ranked first leading to more links.

Here is a paper that uses traffic information from Alexa to disprove this theory. It turns out that queries on search engines are very diverse. This leads to sites appearing towards the top that more specifically target the keywords given. For example Google's Udi Manber said "20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before".

Current traffic from Alexa more closely follows the random surfer model, or discovering of web pages by viewing non-search web pages and clicking on links. It is good to see that worrisome theories are being put to the test.

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