It is odd for Dave Winer to continue to insist that webloggers have an obligation to make sure they are factually correct, when he regularly points to all sorts of nonsense. For example, he continues his passive-aggressive approach toward Google by linking to this article in which Jeremy Zawodny complains about aspects of Google’s page rank algorithm. But Zawodny’s problems are ones that have been reported repeatedly by weblogs and really come down to the often-bizarre things that can temporarily happen to a site while Google is updating its index.
Zawodny writes,
It has already happened. And the results are less than ideal. A Google search for “jeremy” now [sometimes] yields something far different than what it used to. Notice that Google now believes that my home page is more important than my blog. That is, for lack of a better term, retarded.
When I do a Google search on “jeremy” the first link is to Zawodny’s site. But it is not surprising that sometimes a different link comes up. This happens all the time to AnimalRights.Net when Google is updating its index. Usually the site sits at #3, but sometimes temporarily drops to 4 or 5, and occasionally falls off entirely. Such problems appear to be an artifact of the way Google updates its index and propagates such updates to its various servers.
Some of the posters who comment on Zawodny’s claim also put forth a further claim, that Google is no longer crawling new pages on their sites. I don’t know how Google decides how often it should crawl sites, but it crawls AnimalRights.Net very frequently (a bit too frequently, actually). For example, just a few days after I wrote an article that mentioned a California Court Commissioner, that article is already the third link returned on a search on that commissioner’s name.
The really odd thing here is that with no evidence whatsoever, people are running around making claims that Google wants to purge or reduce the importance of weblogs in its database. Given the paucity of evidence, that is absurd. Plus it would be a huge mistake.
The situation is actually the reverse — Google is free riding on the backs of individual webloggers who are collectively performing a function not unlike Google’s automated news service. By indexing all of that content and then using page rank and other methods to make it easy to drill down through, Google has a win-win situation that benefits it as well as visitors to the search engine.
The only people who seem to think this is a bad thing are some of the traditional media folks who are pissed that some weblogger comes up first in a Google search rather than the New York Times or some other such site. But the fact is that the weblogger link is likely more useful than the NYT link would be anyway (when was the last time an NYT story linked to criticism of said story in another newspaper, for example — something that happens all the time in weblog land).