29 September 2008
Google gets search results very badly wrong
As you probably know, Paul Newman, the American actor and film director, died on Friday after a long battle with cancer. Michael Gray spotted that a search for ‘Paul Newman dead’ brings the results shown above, with number 1 result being a story on Digg - ‘Paul Newman believed dead in plane crash‘.
This is a story submitted from nearly 2 years ago. Why has Google got it at number 1? I’ve no idea…its not relevant and its not popular either. This story has only 14 diggs (and probably lots of un-diggs) and has only 7 links pointing to it, all of which are internal links from Digg. I know Google love Digg and think its an authority…but really, this is just completely stupid.
5 Comments currently posted.
Webdesi3 says:
Dave Shaw says:
They do make mistakes…but I think people are starting to spot this kind of thing more and more.
Chris Lang says:
What you have done is produce a theory from unfounded information. You do not understand what has happened here and you did not look into it enough either.
It’s OK I have done this too. But if I can, let me point out your mistakes in thinking this through.
#1 Since the post is from 10-12-2007 it has accrued pagerank over time, hence it will outrank other pages.
The Digg post is a PageRank 0 page, all the others are news items, since they are only a day or so old they have a greyed out page rank.
#2 Next you mention it has only 7 links. At the time you published your blog post the news articles were only hours old so they had NO links.
7 links is more than 0 links.
You also have to take into account the quality of the links, not all links are created equal.
#3 The news articles are few hours old and may have 100s of links but none of those pages have any incoming links or any PageRank either since no one has linked to them.
It is also important to note that PageRank has nothing to do with the rankings you will receive in Google results. It is however a visual indicator of a documents quality, it’s incoming link’s quality and it’s power to rank well in the search engines.
Hope this clarifies why this link is here. Search engine results are not always fair.
It they were you and I would always be top ten under every keyword.
Cheers - Chris Lang
Dave Shaw says:
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your comment.
I was not trying to explain WHY Google were showing this result as number 1, rather I was pointing out the inadequacy of Google’s search results (and therefore their algorithm) in this case.
In reference to what you have said in your comment…
It is true that this page has 7 links, but as I said they are all internal. Again it is true that “not all links are created equal” and I would think that 7 internal links pretty much count for nothing.
You also say that “PageRank has nothing to do with the rankings you will receive in Google results”. In fact PageRank is the basis of Google’s results - it is not only a visual indicator but an important factor in ranking (along with relevancy). Admittedly, toolbar PageRank is a very much simplified version of the real thing.
Chris Lang says:
I certainly did not mean this as an attack on you Dave.
However, the item really has 29 links, just not organic as in displayed in a Yahoo link: search.
Also the Digg item has every reason to be in Websearch, but not in Blogsearch.
Most SEO guys do not understand social media and it is ranked differently from blogs even.
I went into a much deeper explanation on my blog in response to Michael Grey’s post.
While I am not an SEO professional I am a social bookmarking expert and that is where my view point and explanation comes from.
Hope that clarifies things Dave.
Chris Lang
I’ve found this alot with google, although they do have the monopoly on searches they need to cop on sometimes!