Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> Computers may only ingest texts, but computer programs can
> statistically analyze texts, and through such analysis draw
> conclusions about said texts. This is what relevancy ranking is all
> about, and is the sort of thing that has made Google (and information
> retrieval techniques) so useful. These same techniques can be applied
> to description of books and their "aboutness". I wrote a gentle
> introduction to this topic:
Yes, computers can, but my understanding about the Google-type algorithms is that they do *not* analyse the text within a page, they work with the text from other pages that link to a specific page. Therefore, Google is a type of huge "citation index" and can, and has been manipulated. Unfortunately, the Google bomb "miserable failure" doesn't work on Google anymore, but it does on Yahoo. (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=miserable+failure&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fp_ip=IT&vc=) This is something that I show to all my students to see how all kinds of people can manipulate Google indexing: there is no place in the page that "miserable failure" appears. So why is it number one? Because of the other pages that link to the page. And it doesn't matter at all what you do to your page, you can't change it.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Fri Jul 10 2009 - 11:09:20 EDT