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| Popularity: Suspect Throughout the Ages; or, Google Is Not a Democracy At the time I wrote this, the Jill Hennessy site I mention here was and had been ranking beyond #250 for ages. Recently it's doing well, as in top 20. Hmmmm. The concept of "popularity" is nothing new—people who think outside of what's "safe" and "normal" have had to contend with problems associated with this concept for ages. (Know what a witch hunt is? It's when people have too much time on their hands and look for easy targets to blame for their dull lives.) I've been told that Google was the first search engine to use this concept in ranking pages. If this is true, we're supposed to believe that Google's engineers are geniuses because they came up with the idea to (supposedly) give people what they want according to (supposedly) what people say they like?!? I'm trying very hard not to be sarcastic. Regardless, Google's methods do not reflect a democracy—they reflect gossip and popular opinion as expressed by a limited, non-representative portion of the population. This can be okay for some topics—topics where there are tons upon tons of intelligent "voters." In other cases, not so great ... and this becomes more evident the farther down the ladder we go in terms of the number of real pages out there—pages that aren't keyword trap garbage. Once again—against my better judgment—I'll use the example of my colleague's Jill Hennessy site. Not many "voters" here—maybe five at best. Why won't they link to her site? Maybe they're all ninnies, who knows. Maybe they're threatened by my colleague's huge pictures. Maybe they don't like us because we get drunk and e-mail them pleas to at LEAST be honest and tell us to screw off but not leave us hanging. Maybe they think outbound links will dillute PageRank. Who knows, people. The point is, a democracy it's not. I won't even go as far as saying Google's use of popularity is all bad—I'm just saying there could be limits. Like ... oh, I don't know—how's this: If a site is the only site or one of a small handful of sites devoted to a particular topic—in other words, if 99% of everything else out there is keyword trap garbage—then let that site rank in the top 500. How in the world is this not obvious? |
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