San Francisco — Slammed with stinging criticism to enhance the quality of its search results from smaller rivals, and tacitly admitting that Web publishers are flooding its search engine with low-quality pages, Google over the weekend made a significant change to its formula to combat the growing number of websites that exist primarily to land high on its rankings.
Google disclosed the switch late on Thursday, and in an interview on Friday one of the leaders of the company’s campaign said that 11.8 per cent of the queries it received would show changes in the “top few” results on the first page.
“Quality of sites is a very hard thing to define,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, said in a statement. “We had an amazing discovery about a few months back.”
He dated the effort to late 2009, when a revamp of Google’s index brought “fresher” results that also favored shallow content. Singhal further explained that extremely popular search terms might not be perceptibly affected but that topical matters and more obscure subjects would both see changes.
Google rolled out the changes in the US and would soon expand it to the rest of the world, adding that the change would raise the rankings of high-quality Web sites and reduce those of lesser sites, affecting 12 percent of search queries.
Sites known as content farms, which churn out sometimes mindless articles based on what people are searching for, have recently seeped through to the top of search results, frustrating some Google users. High rankings in search results are crucial because they allow Web sites to get more traffic and bring in more business, either through sales of goods and services or through advertising.
These “content farms” and other websites that created low-quality content were damaging the efficacy of Google’s search results, many outside experts charged.
The move also clearly suggests that the company was also concerned about the problem.
Amit Singhal worked on the change to Google’s search engine. Credit: (Thor Swift for The New York Times)
“Most of the revisions that we make, and we make lots of them, are nowhere close to this level of impact,” Singhal said.
“I have not seen as much negative attention on Google’s results as I have in the last month or two — it has been fairly exceptional,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land and an industry expert.
The search engine giant said on its official blog that it was attempting to reduce the rankings in “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”.
The company did not elaborated how it was making the calculations, and website owners reported various impacts. Google said it wanted to boost “sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on”.
“This modification is about more than just cleaning up content farms,” said Chris Copeland, chief executive of GroupM Search, a search marketing firm that is part of the advertising company WPP Group. “Google has a relevancy problem, and they are trying to do something about it.”
Google effected the change after technology bloggers, industry analysts and everyday users complained that its search results had useless pages. The response may help Google’s reputation, Sullivan said.
“The change may not necessarily improve the results — hopefully it will — but it will definitely improve the perception of Google,” he said.
Critics include Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley; Michael Arrington, founder of the TechCrunch blog; and researchers at the University of London.
Early this month, researchers at the University of London published a paper saying Google’s efforts to individualize search results may actually do more to help advertisers target users than help searchers find what they want. Wadhwa, who posted an influential blog Jan. 1 criticizing Google’s search results, has continued to speak out.
Critics like Wadhwa blamed Google of not doing enough to stop content farms from manipulating its search results. When some people click on those results, they go to pages that often include Google text or display ads, Web traffic with the potential to earn revenue for the website — and for Google. In that scenario, Google is not just allowing poor content, it is directly profiting from it.
Google’s search quality “has been getting nasty for the past two or three years,” Wadhwa said. “I have had tremendous feedback from all around the world; people agree with what I said. Google is now on the spot.”
Google still reigns the Web search market in North America and much of Europe, with a 66 percent share in the United States and a larger one in many other countries, according to comScore, a Web analytics company. But it faces ambitious competitors, most notably Microsoft’s Bing.
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