The Power of Google
Surf to "www.google.co.uk"
Type "liar"
Click on "I'm feeling lucky".
The resulting page does not contain the word liar. It would be surprising if it did, since it is the official UK Government biography of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the UK. How does this happen?
Well, if on my page I have the word liar linked to Mr Blair's bio, (as I do back there), then Google adds a little weight to that site wrt to the keyword liar. If 10,000 people link to a site using the same keyword, then Google starts to think that that site must be important for that keyword. Obviously at some, unspecified, threshold the page can begin to rank highly - even to the point of becoming no.1! - even though the word doesn't appear on the page at all. The Google wise will tell you that typically to rank highly for a keyword you include it in the url, title, meta-tags, headings, text, alt tags, image names, etc of your page multiple times.
So how many people must link to Tony's biography using the word liar in order to rank no.1 for a word which does not occur anywhere on the page? One can only guess at present, since I know of no application that will tell you the content of the link text that link to a page, but it must be tens of thousands of links, surely? But if you do a links check on the site Google reckons that it is linked to by "about 1150" other websites - this is chickenfeed on the web!
Maybe this another example of the Google programmers sense of humour? An example of this is to type "french military victories", and click on "I'm feeling lucky" which turns up no hits at all and asks you if you meant to search for "french military defeats" - I tried it today and it's still there. If you do an ordinary search for "french military victories" you do actually find plenty of hits. Ergo this is something programmed by a Google emp somewhere. But no, in the case of "liar" even a standard search turns up the same page.
Has someone at Google got it in for Tony? Or is it the revenge of the internet as a medium for political activism?
BTW If any of you non-brits are wondering, it is widely thought, and said, here that Tony Blair and George Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, and have been lying ever since.
Type "liar"
Click on "I'm feeling lucky".
The resulting page does not contain the word liar. It would be surprising if it did, since it is the official UK Government biography of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the UK. How does this happen?
Well, if on my page I have the word liar linked to Mr Blair's bio, (as I do back there), then Google adds a little weight to that site wrt to the keyword liar. If 10,000 people link to a site using the same keyword, then Google starts to think that that site must be important for that keyword. Obviously at some, unspecified, threshold the page can begin to rank highly - even to the point of becoming no.1! - even though the word doesn't appear on the page at all. The Google wise will tell you that typically to rank highly for a keyword you include it in the url, title, meta-tags, headings, text, alt tags, image names, etc of your page multiple times.
So how many people must link to Tony's biography using the word liar in order to rank no.1 for a word which does not occur anywhere on the page? One can only guess at present, since I know of no application that will tell you the content of the link text that link to a page, but it must be tens of thousands of links, surely? But if you do a links check on the site Google reckons that it is linked to by "about 1150" other websites - this is chickenfeed on the web!
Maybe this another example of the Google programmers sense of humour? An example of this is to type "french military victories", and click on "I'm feeling lucky" which turns up no hits at all and asks you if you meant to search for "french military defeats" - I tried it today and it's still there. If you do an ordinary search for "french military victories" you do actually find plenty of hits. Ergo this is something programmed by a Google emp somewhere. But no, in the case of "liar" even a standard search turns up the same page.
Has someone at Google got it in for Tony? Or is it the revenge of the internet as a medium for political activism?
BTW If any of you non-brits are wondering, it is widely thought, and said, here that Tony Blair and George Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, and have been lying ever since.
posted by Jayarava @ 9:07 am
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