a reply to:
BornAgainAlien
I despise Google with a passion, but I feel I have to interject and add some reality to this discussion.
I work in Search Engine Optimization and web content, so I'm pretty clued-up with regard to what Google does.
This is not a move to rank all sites by some imagined fact score. This will be just one of hundreds of ranking factors, and will only impact certain
sites where facts are presented as being such.
For example, this will have no impact on bloggers or forums, unless you deal in what you claim are facts.
This will be one factor in determining the value of content which directly claims to be a source of factual information. If you have a site where
facts are important, and you claim that frogs are marsupials, you will be out-ranked by a similar site correctly publishing the truth. If you claim
that Brad Pitt was married to Kevin Costner, while another site states that he was married to Jenifer Aniston, you will lose traffic to that other
site when someone is seeking an answer to that question.
But, like I said, I loathe Google for the incredibly damaging near-monopoly it has over millions of businesses, so anything that might damage this
monster is perfectly fine with me.
Perhaps I should just say that people should be using other search engines not because of this new development, but because it is entirely corrupt. It
claims to want to deliver the best results to a surfer, but for almost every product you could search for it offers Amazon (or eBay) as the first
result, even when that page is pathetically weak in comparison to a smaller retailer struggling to provide every minute piece of information on a
page.
I can create a product page on a site for an almost completely unknown item, pack that page with information, be the first to publish it, have a
hundred links into that page from other reputable sources, and I guarantee the moment Amazon (or one of Google's other favored corporations) stocks
that item, all other smaller businesses will come after it.
Almost forgot to mention that Amazon pays Google millions of $'s a year in advertising, and that Google and Amazon have swapped senior staff hundreds
of times over the last five years.
edit on 10-3-2015 by Rocker2013 because: (no reason given)