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.
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.''
Google does not find the most authoritative source. It finds what people believe to be the most authoritative source.
Why do you think this is an authoritative source?
Posted by: Robert K on November 21, 2004 02:46 PM
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