At 2006 Boston Pubcon Dave and I ran into Matt Cutts and I told Matt about this great paper I was working on for airoweb about finding the balance of social bookmarking/voting and the search engine algorithm. I basically summarized it for him on the spot because while I would like to write a paper for airweb, as bad as my writing is I do not think it would see the light of day.
Anyway the summary for the paper I had planed to write is basically this :
When Google hit the mainstream for the search engine market they were like a minor league pitcher coming up into the big leagues of baseball that had a pitch that no batter (spammer) could hit. Then after this pitcher (the search engine algorithm) had thrown for a while people started to see his trends and developed theories on how to best hit his pitch.
Although most experts in the field agree Google still has the best algorithm, its age is showing. In my opinion there is only SO much you can do with a algorithmic based search engine. Sure it will work for a while but eventually spammers will see the trends and adjust and adapt to get there mfa (made for ads) websites into the Google index.
So what is the answer ?
When you look at the trends you can see people are turning to social voting sites like Digg, Slashdot, Del.icio.us to get results. Why are these people using these sites for interesting and new news/information ?
Well –
A) Social Voting – Very very little spam gets into these websites. The user base is very loyal and most of them feel connected with there “vote” on the site. Therefore you see people get VERY upset when people post spam or spam-like stories.
B) Freshness – Generally it takes days, weeks, or months for search engines to index a non-authority blog or website with great content.
So we talked a bit on that subject… Matt threw out some theories but kept his poker face about what Google was doing…
A few days ago Google introduced Google Coop! This is the next generation in search engine technology. To summarize Google coop uses a cooperative voting system to claim authorities in different areas of search. You can see my profile here
Pretty much I think there has been 2 generations of search engines. First one was the algorithmic based which placed the most emphasis on there formula to determine the value of a site. The 2nd was when they used back links as a form of “voting” for sites. Now I believe social voting is the 3rd generation of search engine.
In my opinion when Google finds the right mixture of algorithm and social voting they will no longer lead the pack of search engines, they will leave them behind.
SM your writing may be lacking but it is clear you are a total genious in SEM.
By the way – I heard you on webmasterradio again yesterday. When is your show starting?
Jeremy, you nailed this on the head. The first thing that I thought when I heard of Google Coop was “Great, that’s one more thing I have to learn and add to my daily chores”. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do SEO as a one-man-shop without a team of specialty experts (one does content, one does design, one does linkbait, one does linkbuilding, one spams Shoemoney forums, etc). I almost considered hanging up my cleats on this one and just focusing on building my own sites instead of working with clients.
But, after thinking it out, I decided to stay in the game. If SEOs can get in on these new technologies early enough, the learning curve increases for newbies and barrier-to-entry is higher and it is no longer so easy to get into the SEO industry.
Not talking about the SEO industry becoming a bunch of Elitists, but I am noting that it will be much more difficult to spam in the industry and spammers will start to weed out. The SEO industry might just earn a “solid” reputation afterall.
Very interesting Shoemoney. I think that Co-op does add something that no other search engine currently has.
This has been on my mind for about a year now. I discussed this on an SEO forum a while back.
I have always thought that Google will be able or should be able to record (through the Google Toolbar) when someone bookmarks a site. This will give a site a chance to get votes without backlinks which in turn will give good credible sites a boost over spammy sites. No one bookmarks a spammy site.
Just my thoughts.
Dude, they spelled your name wrong.
It’s listed as (Shoemony)
Just thought you should know.
[…] I signed up with Google Coop just now. It looks like a social bookmarking type feature?. I am still getting my head around it. I have never been really big on these types of things, but I am sure Google might be using these kinds of features to aid their search results. […]
thanks for noticing… the issue is you can not have a id over 8 charectors so I had to cut it short
[…] There’s an interesting post over at ShowMoney in which Jeremy put forward an intriguing idea about finding the balance of social bookmarking/voting and the search engine algorithm. When Google hit the mainstream for the search engine market they were like a minor league pitcher coming up into the big leagues of baseball that had a pitch that no batter (spammer) could hit. Then after this pitcher (the search engine algorithm) had thrown for a while people started to see his trends and developed theories on how to best hit his pitch. […]
The problem I have with “social voting” is that it mimics human nature, in that there is a propensity for “mob mentality”. Popularity contests are usually nothing more than a competition of snowball effects.
Will I get better results if my search is based on what most other people have voted for as being interesting, useful, etc? Possibly, but there is also a huge possibility that the results will represent nothing more than a bunch of sheep voting “me too!” on something that someone else has recommended.
I wonder how many others suddenly thought about the weaknesses from people manipulating this with “coop” voting groups? It wouldn’t take much effort to get a large number of people “voting” etc.
ANYTHING and EVERYTHING can be manipulated. When back links came into the game many “white hats” thought that the game was over for “black hats” … was it? 🙂
Now some people claim social bookmarking is the future – one thats hard to manipulate. Hard? Maybe. Impossible. NO WAY! I dosn’t have to be as blatant as the old MySpace hack (http://fast.info/myspace/) and it dosn’t even have to include hacking. Machines, algorithms and humans can all be manipulated – even if invented in the great Plex 🙂 … just watch …
Google setzt immer mehr auf Mitarbeit seiner User…
…
The trouble with social algorithms is that it only shows you where people have been.
The old Google used to show you new information, new places, new sites you hadn’t heard of but we’re pleased to discover.
Now Google is looking to reduce the internet world to a sort of equivalent of package holidays – popular destinations only, and the real gems that people should find to get dumped.
2c.
Pretty god idea.
[…] work more with human-powered reviews, which go with Google Coop and Custom Search Engines and will probably build another way to mine only human-reviewed content (such as a search engine with all the human-reviewed (through CSEs) websites) […]
lol that rocks… im still workin on a coop