3 ms·
> Google's basic premise of ranking the importance of a site based on how many links it gets and where from is wildly inaccurate in the era of social networking
by pseut 14y ago
> Google's basic premise of ranking the importance of a site based on how many links it gets and where from is wildly inaccurate in the era of social networking. Normal people mostly don't run their own public web sites or blogs any more, they share stuff on sites like Facebook and often only with their "friends".
I'm not sure that I understand this point. I thought that Google wants to index Twitter (for example) but is prohibited by Twitter. So it's hard to see that their premise is wrong: personal recommendations on social networks are just inbound links from specific sites, just not sites that Google can index.
- Silhouette 14y agoI'm sure Google would like to index all kinds of private content, but since they can't see it, they can't index it. Moreover, a lot of public forums based on user-generated content automatically annotate their links so they don't contribute to page rank either; this is done for sensible reasons to prevent blatant spamming, but does mean that a lot of legitimate positive links also don't count. This combination undermines the entire idea that a page rank based on the quality and quantity of incoming links that Google can see and will count is a good indicator of the value of a site. In other news, searching for things on Google increasingly seems to turn up large, commercial sites first and only to reach smaller, more personal, and often more informative/less biased sites several pages down. Meanwhile, posting a question to my friends on any private forum we share will often get better results within a few minutes anyway.