Google's Integrity

Duncan Wilcox explains bits and pieces of Google's inner workings and links to a lot of relevant articles in this article. However, he expresses a fear that blogs can bias the search results: Google's integrity:

Google's the best search engine out there, it's become so essential for everyday web browsing that we need it to be fair and unbiased, we need to be sure there isn't a distortion lens in front of our memories, we don't want to be afraid to believe in Google.

His theory/justification is that blogging now being a major source of web-links, the political views of bloggers may skew the search results and PageRanks in a favourable direction for libertarian webpages:

Weblogs have involountairly been inflating their respective PageRank (and by propagation, also the the sites they link to) by crosslinking with affine sites — a technique known as blogrolling. [...] ''There are significant political consequences to the Blogger Effect: Because the blogging community contains a disproportionate number of libertarians, it's possible that Google searches on certain hot-button issues will start skewing toward libertarian-friendly pages.''

About this, Chad Lundgren writes:

Google does not find the most authoritative source. It finds what people believe to be the most authoritative source.

For more information, check out the Google blog or David Gallagher's adventures.

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