Thu 11 Sep 2008
The value of Chrome…
Posted by bill under I saw this
I’m writing a piece for Ariel, the BBC’s in-house newspaper, about Google Chrome, so I did some searching and was surprised just how many entries about the browser Google managed to find and how many of them were about the browser rather than the metal: if you search for ‘chrome’ on Google then the top seven hits refer to their browser
.
Yet a similar search in Microsoft’s live search offers a range of Google-related news articles as the top hit, followed by a lot of links about chrome-plated cars. For those who have ever believed that Google’s organic search is somehow an objective reflection of the internet’s current interests and activities, this should make the Google-centrism of its worldview clearly evident.
When you search at google.com you are looking through rainbow-coloured glasses into a representation of the web where Google values and Google interests come first.
Later, via Twitter from mattjones
@billt Ranking algorithm at work? More queries relating to the browser, not chrome plating. So top results should be about Chrome, surely?
I’m not convinced…
September 12th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Bill, I would be careful using the Live Search as a comparison.
My experience is that Live Search is pretty poor - you get the impression that they are totally re-engineering it - some of the discussions on various SEO sites suggest they are years behind Google. Perhaps that’s why they have been so interested in Yahoo? Paul.
September 16th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
It’s difficult to say whether Google’s results have Chrome as high relevance because they fixed it that way, or because their search engine is better at considering relevance in a given time frame than Live Search. I mean, it is highly likely that people searching for Chrome in the last few days since Google Chrome launched would be looking for Google Chrome and so, it makes sense that a search engine gives a high relevance to results pointing at Google Chrome.
In my opinion, the fact that Live Search did not, suggests their search engine is falling short rather than Google’s being biased.