Google Adjusts Search Algorithms in the USA

Claire Cain Miller reports for the [I]New York Times[/I], 25 Feb 2011:

[URL]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/technology/internet/26google.html?src=busln[/URL] (for full article)
[INDENT]In a tacit admission that experts are increasingly manipulating online search engines, google has revised its methods to improve the quality of its search results.

Responding to criticism that the quality of its search results had declined, Google said late Thursday that it had made the change to raise the rankings of high-quality Web sites and reduce those of lower-quality sites.
[B]The change[/B], which Google said [B]would affect 12 percent of search queries[/B], seemed to be an acknowledgment that an industry devoted to gaming search results had increasingly managed to pollute the search engine by pushing less relevant sites higher.

Most recently, sites known as content farms, which churn out sometimes mindless articles based on what people are searching for, have worked their way to the top of search results, frustrating some Google users....

Google makes about 500 changes a year to the algorithm, or formula, that runs its search engine, most of them minor. Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who worked on the latest change, said in an interview that users were likely to quickly notice this one.

[B]â??We havenâ??t done a change where we have impacted low-quality sites at this level in years,â?[/B] Mr. Singhal said. â??Itâ??s a clear evolution of the algorithm as the Web is evolving, the content on the Web is evolving, the user expectation is evolving.â? ....

Of course, the quality of a particular site is subjective. To determine quality, Google does things like track â??boomerangâ? searches, when people click on a link and promptly click back to the results, and ask people to compare search results ....
[/INDENT]Google's announcement ("To start with, weâ??re launching this change in the [B]U.S. only[/B]; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time") :

[URL]http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html[/URL]