Weblogs Influence Results of 1 Billion Google Searches Per Week
Corante published an article by John Hiler called Google Loves Blogs. This article explains two important but little understood aspects of Google's PageRank technology that is the primary determinant of which web pages show up first on a Google search result page:
- Google treats links that point to a web site an indication of the target site's relevance.
- Google crawls sites that are updated daily much more often than other web sites.
- Google values links on recently updated pages more than similar links on older web pages.
As a result of these policies, weblogs and news-oriented web sites have a greater influence on Google search results than many users realize. This makes sense because any search engine with access to such huge volumes of information must use some time factors in its page relevancy calculations.
The article also points out the emergence of sites like blogdex and Daypop, which provide a sort of "daily greatest hits" of the most popular weblogs. These sites are interesting to look at because they demonstrate the breadth of topics covered by weblogs and the degree to which some weblogs cover the same stories as others.
These meta weblogs also have slightly different audiences and weblogs that they cover. Blogdex, hosted by MIT Media Lab appears to pickup more technology-oriented weblogs than Daypop does.