Blogs: A Two Faced Sword for the Search Engines

Rai Umair — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 07:04:00 GMT

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.

A Billion Dollars and More

Rai Umair — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 16:13:00 GMT

One thing we would all agree upon is having that much financial muscle; a really nice piece of dialog I remember from one of the God Father movies (my favorite movies infact) is that ‘Finance is a gun and Politics is the Art Of Knowing when to pull the trigger’.

Well Forbes latest Billionaire List is out and Bill Gates with $ 46.82 billion tops again, but what I really like about the new list is that Larry Page and Sergey Brin are on the list too, for people who don’t know who the two our… one word for them ‘Google’. I adore google, it helps me find what I need when I need it and amazingly Yahoo search is a lot better now then it used to be, I guess yahoo will content sharply with Google, MSN Search well now that they have switch the back end from Google to Inkatomi that they now already own. Lastly Google is going all IPO and that's a sure prediction and Surprise, surprise! iIt's also coming up with an email service.

One day I want to see my name up with the giants till then I better keep shut and work more. Just in case you happen to read this and feel interested let me know.

Information Retrieval

Blogs: A Two Faced Sword for the Search Engines

A Billion Dollars and More