[gibwell]

The whole 'algorithms do the ranking' thing is a misdirection. Algorithms do of course rank pages, but they do so according to criteria chosen by humans employed by Google. Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement, applied by machine. It is disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.

[pedalpete]

Can you give a concrete example of this? What 'criteria' is chosen by humans? Do you mean stuff like are the key terms in the h1 tags? I would still consider that an algorithm doing the ranking, and PageRank also is the major factor in deciding what gets returned, and though a human wrote the mathematics, they aren't scoring each page individually to quantify the value of each link.

[drakaal]

Greatest Living American. Google it. Read how I was the greatest living american, Colbert was, and then an seo firm was. All in the matter of a few weeks, because google changed scores to "hand job" the results.

[daliusd]

It feels like something is wrong with your comment. I'm pretty sure that Google does something what looks more like A/B testing than law making process. That basically means that you should have some magic power to guess how adjusting one parameter (I don't even speak about multiple) will affect final result. Could you guess how mathematical attractors will behave by changing some parameters? Are you sure Google hires super geniuses that can guess weather? If they do why Google has not released they weather prognosis service yet that would wipe-out all competition from the scene?

[gibwell]

They don't need magic powers. They employ hundreds of human raters to judge the quality of search results according to Google's criteria and biases.

[martin-adams]

While I wont speak for gibwell, I'm interpreting what is saying that Google do set the criteria of what metrics deem a higher or lower ranking page.

For example:

- More time users spend on a page indicates it's more relevant

- More high quality inbound links indicates higher quality content

- Content seen as spammy are considered can lower page rank

The fact is that Google don't discriminate based on the rules they set out within their algorithm. When Google say their algorithm does the choosing, it does, but it's the same algorithm used across the whole internet, giving a fair competitive landscape. That's the theory at least.

[devx]

What worries me more is that Google is increasingly choosing to put brands at the top of the search results.

Don't get me wrong, if I'm looking for the Apple website, I should absolutely get Apple.com first in Google, and not a medium-sized blog talking about Apple. So relevancy should matter most.

However, I fear that they are ranking bigger sites and bigger brands above more relevant posts from medium-sized, sites, too. And that I don't like. Give the little guy a chance, especially if his post is of higher quality.

And no I don't think that if the big site's post gets retweeted 100 times and the medium-sized' post gets retweeted 10 times, it should matter much, because resharing is just a side-effect of being big and having a big audience, and I think it's less about the "quality" of the post.

Google ends up promoting bigger and bigger sites at the top, while downranking the smaller ones, who are impacted negatively by a lot of factors (smaller age, fewer backlinks, fewer reshares, etc).

So I guess my point is, on-page "performance" (for lack of a better word) should always count more than off-page performance.

[vdaniuk]

This is just a power law applied to the distribution of inbound links. As time progresses, the gap widens.

Moreover, very frequently a little guy has content on bigger sites and enjoys traffic from being integrated into the bigger site ecosystem. Reasoning about search engine result pages is hard because it is a very complex system with multiple various parameters that are factored in.

[gibwell]

I agree that Google uses one rule set across the whole internet. I don't think they have anything resembling a list of competitors to downgrade or anything like that.

However the algorithm is based on hundreds of metrics, and is highly discriminating. In addition, Google uses human raters to determine what a good quality result is. This is fed back into tuning the weighting of the metrics.

Therefore, the biases and judgements of these human employees will be reflected in the results.

[vdaniuk]

Oh no, you are wrong. Machine learning algorithms that are used by Google learn by observing behaviours of users and the results of this learning is essentially a black box of parameters and weights for the target function. Certainly they analyze the data and add some parameters manually, for example, manual review process but most of the work is done in the opaque black box. So your statement that "Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement" is not accurate.

[gibwell]

You say I'm wrong but your argument then supports exactly my position. The 'black box' is trained by humans, and it applies their judgments to the pages it processes.