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The author is selling google way short here: "It's a little scary to think that one company (~85% of the world population searches the web with Google) can make
by bgruber 15y ago
The author is selling google way short here: "It's a little scary to think that one company (~85% of the world population searches the web with Google) can make such a trifle assumption and make a simple, clear cut spec like this virtually unusable." In short, I believe the author is making an unfounded and probably wrong assumption when he says that Google is making an assumption.
It seems to me from reading Google's blog post on the subject (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/paginatio...) that they're basing their behavior on what they believe to be preferential to their users based on the data they've collected. Here's an example: "Because view-all pages are most commonly preferred by searchers, we do our best to surface this version..." They don't say "we are assuming view-all pages are preferred," they actually know that they are.
It's true that Google's post doesn't say something similar about why they choose to surface the first page in a sequence, but I think their reputation suggests that they have numbers to support the idea. In any case, I wouldn't assume that their behavior is based on an assumption.
- onderhond 15y agoGoogle bases their actions on dry information harvested from people. Human science does not exist without statistics, and statistics requires you to make assumptions. Google can analyze me till kingdom come, it cannot correctly predict what I prefer at a certain moment in time. And as for big companies making documented assumptions, check what Facebook rolled out today in their news feed. In situations where user preference is key, the only option is to leave the decision to the individual user. I don't mind if Google implements this and offers it as a service to their users, but deciding based on dry statistics is never good, it leaves people frustrated and makes it impossible for authors to properly implement a spec like this.
- robrenaud 15y agoI work on localsearch ranking at Google, but this I don't know anything about Google's use of this information in web search, nor am I speaking for Google. This is about the philosophy of how we approach problems in ranking. The appropriate question is not, "is this going to work everytime?". If that was the question, basically no one would make progress in web search ever. The web is littered with randomness and corner cases. The question is, "is this a a generally good heuristic, will it help more than it hurts, and can we detect when the heuristic fails badly?" I am guessing that if this prev/next information is used, it will be to boost the front page of an article that has SOME support for the query over the second or third or n'th page of an article that has more, but not exceptionally more support for the query. Don't think of this as a hard if, but more like an additional weight in a summed comparison that biases towards the first page over later pages in a sequence.
- olliesaunders 15y agoYes, my thoughts too. The author pulled this quote from a Google document but is there any evidence The Google Search Engine is even implementing this behavior in a negative way? I doubt there’s a company in the world that doesn’t say it does X in some document but do Y in reality. That’s the problem with documentation: it rots.