So there’s an article over at the BBC at the moment about Google celebrating its fifth birthday. As part of this article there’s this paragraph:
Web logs, or blogs, pose a particular problem for Google as one of their defining features is the links they have to other blogs. As the numbers of blogs has grown the influence they have over rankings has increased. In some cases blogs referring to a webpage on a particular subject are ranked higher than the page itself. To combat this Google has considered creating an index just for the web journals.
My question is quite simple, really. The possibility that weblogs might be skewing the Google’s results has been mentioned several times before, but as far as I know Google have never come out and confirmed these stories – and they have actively denied that a potential ‘separate index’ would involve removing weblog from their main index. So my concern is not what Google may or may not be doing, but whether the BBC has just based that part of its article on the article written by Andrew Orlowski on this issue, which conjured a fair amount of spurious fantasy and assertion out of surprisingly limited evidence. If they have, I have to confess I’d be disappointed…