- Image via Wikipedia
Google, the foundation who were once proud of the fact that their software relied totally on a democratic process in the form of their algorithm to display to the top sites on the web, open the doors for a future that may not be so “democratic”.
Marissa Mayer stated in an interview:
“Google’s use of user data created by actions on Wiki search to improve search results on Google in general. For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.”
So is she saying that sometime in the near future, Google’s staff will decide who should be on top?
To me it looks like they will manipulate the search results to favour what they believe should be top of the pile.
You could argue that this is what their software already does although in a very complex manner. Basing their algorithm on a link popularity score, meant it was easily manipulated by SEOs across the world. But do they really need to make this a manual process?
