Google tracking result choices
It looks like Google is starting to track which search results people select. This technique is used in many enterprise search products to allow the administrator to help users refine searches, create synonym lists, etc.
They aren’t doing it for all searches but I found one query. If you search for ‘oyster bay wines’ on Google UK, the result links will go to a preprocessor rather than directly to the site. Check out the status bar in the image:
I would be surprised if Google has started to manually analyze their searches so I assume they now have some clever software that does it for them.
June 22nd, 2005 at 6:06 pm
I just saw an article about google filing a patent on information retrieval based on historical data here is the link: http://www.seochat.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=256
The reasons for filing a patent are also explained in the paper. According to the author Google will be ranking search results according to “freshness” of the content, thus pages which are regularly updated would be ranked higher than those which are not. Interesting stuff!
June 23rd, 2005 at 8:58 am
I saw that article too. It’s interesting to see what lengths Google has to go to prevent search engine spam. I’m thankful that with the search engine product that I’m working on I don’t have to worry about that sort of thing, and can focus more on content orientated ranking techniques.
It does have the positive effect of ranking my pages higher in my Google vanity search.