Blogging has lead the ‘page rank’: web search results ranking algorithm pioneered by founders of google to do their job better in some ways and on another front lead them hopelessly astray.
Page rank is the algorithm working behind the scenes in almost all leading search engines of today at least in part to rank web results.
What makes blogging so useful to the page rank algo is that the human touch involved in blogging gives further authenticity to web pages which owners include on their sites as reference (for data and information), hence leading to better recognition of good resource son the web by the search engines,
The principle of random walks really comes to life here as envisioned by the founders of google but there is a bad side to all of this too.
Unfortunately blogs allow comments and track backs with no real verification which in turn become very easy targets of exploitation by any corrupt web master and lead the search engines to foolishly favor the bad guys. This is formally known us ‘Blog Spamming’ or ‘Google Bombing’.
In the case of the search engines it sure is a difficult situation and counter measures if any will be hard to materialize. I have a rough sketch of how this problem can be solved and will surely talk about it in an upcoming rant.