Google admit manual tweak?
Google have made us aware for many years that their ranking procedures are algorithm based. This gives some of us a feeling of some security no doubt - that the natural results we see are the result of a process which analyses all websites in a similar manner and comes up with the resulting rankings as a result of each website being subject to the same process.
We noticed with interest a post on Google’s help forum yesterday (7th Oct) asking “Why did Google fail me on such a straightforward search?”. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web%20Search/thread?tid=33778b5d5232c234&hl=en. The poster was asking why, when searching for text relating to President Obama’s statement on Information Literacy Awareness Month, this didn’t show up anywhere in the first 20 results.
A Google employee was straight on the case and within a day has posted that they made a “slight change” and now such a search appears at the top of the first page on Google.
It’s good news that Google welcomes and acts upon such comments. But it is even more interesting to note that they themselves felt that their algorithm has not returned an appropriate result. Furthermore, they are willing to “tweak” the results of their search engine manually.
We know that Google act by penalising or banning individual sites who they feel contravene their guidelines or who seek to manipulate their search results, but it also raises the question as to how much covert manual “tweaking” Google get involved in. This post on their forum certainly shows they are willing to - is this a one off?
The poster also notes how Bing displays the result he/she was searching for at the top. In our experience with Bing / MSN, we have had previous Microsoft-owned companies come to us for search optimisation - there was no way that MSN was going to tweak its algorithm to favour even their own brands. More recently, we’ve also seen enquires come in from Bing - previously always a poor source of enquiries – due to Google ruling the roost with the lion’s share of the search engine market. As more people get fed up (in the UK at least) with search results featuring pointless Youtube videos and listings of irrelevant local firms with a map, are people starting to look towards the other search engines in numbers?
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