Google responds to NY Times article by improving its algorithms

Re:Google responds to NY Times article by improving its algo... by dcdan on Wednesday December 01, 2010 @07:50PM (#1960477)

This feels like mostly a PR piece to me. And reports seem conflicting.

Google doesn't seem to say what they did beyond that they "developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience."

Danny Sullivan claims they are "Using Online Merchant Reviews As Ranking Signal" (http://searchengineland.com/google-now-using-online-merchant...).

Techcrunch claims Google "compiled a list of hundreds of merchants (including DecorMyEyes) that provided “bad user experience” and algorithmically forced them lower" (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/googl/).

edit: typo

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Re:Google responds to NY Times article by improving its algo... by lawrence on Wednesday December 01, 2010 @08:06PM (#1960515)

Hopefully this is PR spin. If it's not, it's pretty disturbing that allegations of one mean merchant can cause an algo change. How many businesses will be collateral damage of this update? How many fake negative review campaigns with this spawn? If this is a real algo change, it was done in an extraordinarily hasty, reactionary, and cavalier manner. (Please don't ding my site G, nothing personal)

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Re:Google responds to NY Times article by improving its algo... by smiler on Thursday December 02, 2010 @11:29AM (#1962558)

The techcrunch piece is nothing more than some filler around the Google blog post. I don't think it's offering any extra insight.

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