google - good or evil
Out of context: Reply #13
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- monNom0
I think the high ranking of commercial sites trying to sell you flowers and whatnot is likely due to the way google ranks pages. I've heard that it's mainly based on the number of outside sites linking directly to the site in question.
with a large e-commerce site who likely has many link exchanges with various directories and indexes, aswell as "best price online" type sites as part of its online marketing, not to mention banner advertising, you will get a higher google rating than, say, a botanist's personal home page on geocities which is linked within a close circle of similarly interested parties.
I agree that google is starting to produce less and less acurate results (maybe it's just warm fuzzy memories of the past). but it's to be expected when a technology matures, and people start figuring out how to beat the system. (remember when you could put a buh-zillion meta tags in your page and rank high in any search category on yahoo? same thing)
google will eventually be unseated from it's thrown just like yahoo! has been. And it'll probably be by microsoft with some sort of windows bundled search that makes it too damn easy to use anything else... either that, or breaks the other technologies to improve in comparison.
ramble ramble ramble...