In very basic terms, algorithms are just calculations used to come up with an answer to a problem. They are automated and require no human input. This allows them to address massive problems (such as sorting the whole of the Internet) with a relatively low human input. Once the algorithm is written, it just needs to be updated and tweaked over time.
However, on my trips onto Google recently I've noticed somethings which don't look very 'automated' and look like some manual intervention has happened.
Here are just a couple of examples. This week I was looking for the logo of the new Microsoft search engine, Bing. Google doesn't know what Bing - the search engine - looks like (yet). In fact, the results it's returned were less than family safe (I have my image search setting on 'Moderate' and was a bit surprised at the images presented!). I have included a 'strict' version of the results below as the 'Moderate' and 'Off' versions definitely shouldn't be shown here!
Secondly, I was looking to find out information about a link buying service called 'Text-Link-Ads' (TLA). I know that this site is used to buy & sell links to help improve SEO positions; something that is something that is frowned upon by Google. I also know that there is a lot of conversation around this website on many forums as to whether it is a good thing or not.
Therefore there must be links to the site which would mean that Google WOULD know about it. Given I was searching for the name of the company, and the company had its name in the URL, it should've ranked #1 easily. But does it return any results when you do a search for them? See for yourself...
Nowhere to be seen.
I find both of these examples slightly strange. I can sort of understand why there are no images returned for just 'Bing' - it is a new name and there maybe a long history of other images being attached to the word 'Bing' (but no sign of Chandler character from Friends for some reason). Given the amount of blogs/tweets created about the new name Bing recently I would have expected to have seen at least ONE logo show up! But there were none. A more specific search for 'Bing logo' does indeed return the result I was looking for.
It does also make me think that perhaps Microsoft should have thought a little bit harder about the name of their new company. That's another matter...
On the TLA issue, this looks seriously suspicious. Why would a well known and well linked site not appear #1 on Google for it's own brand term? It has a PageRank of 5, which is pretty good (and indication that Google knows about the site and rates it fairly highly) and over 100,000 back links according to Yahoo! Very few sites have this amount of backlinks.
I believe that Google may well be adjusting its results to stop this website getting rankings and hence traffic. It would do this to stop people from buying links and then increasing their rankings artificially, something which they do not endorse at all.
Google has said in the past;
"Our search results are not manipulated by hand. We're not able to make any manual changes to the results."
but I can't see that their algorithm is so smart as to take out sites which it thinks do not adhere to the Google webmaster guidelines (taken from this post - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23155.htm). If it is, then they're even better than we give them credit for!
If they are changing the rankings then this does open up a big trust issue. Why try and get ranking results if it's possible that Google manually filters rankings to suit it's own needs? How can we trust an algorithm to provide the best results when they could be changed to suit Googles own interests?
If anyone else has examples of where Google may have manually filtered, it would be interesting to hear them.
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