I’m writing a piece for Ariel, the BBC’s in-house newspaper, about Google Chrome, so I did some searching and was surprised just how many entries about the browser Google managed to find and how many of them were about the browser rather than the metal: if you search for ‘chrome’ on Google then the top seven hits refer to their browser
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Yet a similar search in Microsoft’s live search offers a range of Google-related news articles as the top hit, followed by a lot of links about chrome-plated cars. For those who have ever believed that Google’s organic search is somehow an objective reflection of the internet’s current interests and activities, this should make the Google-centrism of its worldview clearly evident.
When you search at google.com you are looking through rainbow-coloured glasses into a representation of the web where Google values and Google interests come first.
Later, via Twitter from mattjones
@billt Ranking algorithm at work? More queries relating to the browser, not chrome plating. So top results should be about Chrome, surely?
I’m not convinced…
Bill, I would be careful using the Live Search as a comparison.
My experience is that Live Search is pretty poor – you get the impression that they are totally re-engineering it – some of the discussions on various SEO sites suggest they are years behind Google. Perhaps that’s why they have been so interested in Yahoo? Paul.
It’s difficult to say whether Google’s results have Chrome as high relevance because they fixed it that way, or because their search engine is better at considering relevance in a given time frame than Live Search. I mean, it is highly likely that people searching for Chrome in the last few days since Google Chrome launched would be looking for Google Chrome and so, it makes sense that a search engine gives a high relevance to results pointing at Google Chrome.
In my opinion, the fact that Live Search did not, suggests their search engine is falling short rather than Google’s being biased.