The Blogger Effect at Google

Google Blogger Effect (RSS Title)

Nr. 4 - July 7, 2003 - posted by Andis Kaulins - - Copyright © 2003 by Andis Kaulins

In his article, "Use the blog, Luke", see The Blogger Effect, Steven Johnson in his Salon.com article discusses how the ranking algorithm at Google tends to rank blogs higher than other URL counterparts due to their penchant (strong inclination) for linking to other blogs. Many of his remarks are also applicable to the other search engines as well.

Since blogs are constantly linking to other blogs and often doing this on a daily basis, this puts blogs high in the Google rankings. Google ranks those sites higher which are linked to more frequently by other sites, especially those with a high ranking themselves. The result is that so-called "popular" blogs can easily rise in Google's algorithmic rankings through clever URL placement in the blog scene. The frequency of linking aspect is nothing new. In his "Fear of Links" article, on Salon.com, Scott Rosenberg has noted that modern journalists who profusely use links in their reporting have derogatorily even been called linkalists.

To see how Google works - by no means flawlessly - in ranking by quantity, one need merely plug the term "http" into the Google search box, which results in the following top 50 sites (duplicates removed) in the order of their Google ranking (out of a total of 267,000,000): Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AltaVista, Adobe, My Excite, Amazon, CNN, Lycos, Go.com (Infoseek), Map Quest, Netscape, New York Times, RealNetworks, HotBot, WebCrawler, IBM, World Wide Web Consortium, USATODAY, Internet Movie Database, Macromedia, Hewlett-Packard, Washington Post, Northern Light, Tucows Downloads, MetaCrawler, WinZip, Apple, Google Groups, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Dogpile, United Nations, Sun Microsystems, Weather Channel, Symantec, Barnes & Noble, CNET, AllTheWeb, WorldBank, ZDNet, Monster.com, WinAmp, Apache.org, Slashdot, eBay, American Red Cross, AskJeeves, Intel, Gnu.org, AOL.

If one enters "www" in the search box, this gives a far greater total of 962,000,000 sites and the top 50 list changes somewhat. Try it out.
As a website or blog owner, one is virtually "one in a billion".

Once we take out the major search engines and software makers from the "www" and "http" searches, Google rankings show that news and current events rule the Google ranking roost. If we search for the major sites in the United Kingdom, for example, by entering "co.uk" in Google, the top-ranked URLs are the BBC, the Guardian, the Times Online, the Telegraph, the Register, etc. It is thus small wonder that the most popular blogs focus on recent events.

In terms of the world of blogs, the Google search entries "blog", "blogs", "blogger", "web log", "web logs", "weblog", "weblogs", "pundit" and "pundits" result in an eclectic mixture of URLs which is in part far removed from the actual popularity or quality of the best blogs, although a few of the best do manage to creep into the top listings, e.g. the blog of Lawrence Lessig, at Stanford Law School, my own alma mater. As noted at Microdoc News, Google is set up more to find a particular document, rather than an organized set of documents, and hence Google also has trouble tracing blogologues (i.e. blog dialogues) in the blogosphere (i.e. the world of blogs) as well.

Another problem with Google and the blogs is that a reference to a blog, even if critical, automatically raises that blog in the Google standings. There is of course no way for Google as yet to sort our positive and negative references to blogs. Hence, one should ponder critical statements about a blog carefully. As every cat that turns its back on its owner knows, aloof silence is often a better short-term weapon than active negative recognition. Of course, in the long term, this strategy too has its limitations. Formidable opponents can not be ignored forever.

Google is aware of many of these and similar search engine problems which are discussed in length at WebmasterWorld.com.

Interestingly, if the words "Google blogs pundit" are entered in the Google search bar, Google returns as the number one ranked URL a posting at a very bright 20-year old's Pundit Ex Machina blog, where the owner has intentionally not entered a single link onto that particular blog post and notes that blogs feed Google and vice versa. It is very interesting reading for anyone wishing to understand the blog world and its symbiotic relation to the major search engine. As Sean Kirby, the author of Pundit Ex Machina, notes in a later posting, Google will be adding a separate tab for blogs soon, presuming they can figure out a sensible way to automatically distinguish a blog from a normal URL.