Google and Its Social Signal

April 17, 2011

This short item is about improving relevance ranking, not about getting 20,000 Googlers to “do social” in order to get a super sized bonus. With the carnage search engine optimization wizards and content farm managers have created, relevance is trendy again at the “new” Google.

So, the 12 year old Google is on the lookout for ways to improve their ranking systems and it seems that they are at it again. According to the Search Engine Watch article “Checks and Balances in Ranking Signals” Google has introduced a new social signal. The new signal is known as the +1 button.

According to the author of the article this new system is simply “Google’s latest move to reshape their ranking algorithms.” Links were once the primary way that people found the information that was relevant to them until spammers entered the scene. According to the write up:

An ongoing battle between Google and the spammers has followed. Google gradually made some progress, with most of the major firms who sell links exiting that business.

Google has introduced programs such as Google Analytics and Google Toolbar that work as a type of checks and balances to weed out the spammers. Google can monitor the user behavior on each of these sites and determine what search results users find relevant thereby weeding out potential spammers. Though the idea of weeding out spammers seems good with the amount of money that Google makes from advertisers it’s likely that spam isn’t Google’s main concern.

The challenge, however, is that some users may be quite comfortable relying on services that make it easy to ask a friend for the needed information. That method does not lead directly to Google and its search box that requires the user’s query to unlock a treasure trove of information. Facebook, to cite one example, lets a teen, tween, or recent journalism school graduate ask a friend. Catching up might be harder to do than Neil Sedaka’s challenge in “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”. To wit:

I beg of you, don’t say goodbye
Can’t we give our love another try
Come on baby, let’s start a new
‘Cause breaking up is hard to do

Get your copy on iTunes right now.

Stephen E Arnold and Alice Holmes, April 17, 2011

Freebie unlike an iTunes music object

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Google, News, Social

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.