Overrated

There’s something funny going on at Google…

Looking through the site logs, I see a number of hits from people coming from search engine results. That’s not all that unusual; that’s what they do, after all. The strange thing is, I seem to be abnormally highly ranked for some of those searches.

For example, for a particular pop-culture phrase my site is ranked #5 by Google at the moment. That’s even higher than its original appearances on SA and the Flash animation it inspired! There are also plenty of other sites that have discussed it considerably more in-depth, yet for some reason my one-time throwaway reference to it appears before the vast majority of them when it shouldn’t even be in the top 100.

Likewise I get a lot of hits for Diablo 2-related searches. I have discussed that topic in somewhat more depth, but there’s a different problem here — the searches are usually seeking raw information, whereas the discussion here usually assumes a working knowledge of that information already. I’ve had to go back through those articles and add links back to sites that provide the background and raw info just so those people who were searching for it won’t have completely wasted their time visiting here. You’d think that they’d have found that info first in their search, but no, somehow they wound up here first.

It’s possible that due to the way search engines like Google rank their pages, blogs are becoming overrepresented and overranked relative to their actual value. What would previously have been hidden on some subpage that few people would have linked to before is now present on the front page for some period of time, and the front page is highly linked among all of the blogger’s friends, which drives the ranking of the page up. Even when it moves to the archives, it still inherits some of the rank indirectly from the front page.

Discussions of topics on blogs aren’t necessarily all that useful, either. Like I mentioned before they typically assume a certain degree of knowledge about the topic already and are just relating it to that person’s own life or experiences, which may or, more likely, may not help someone who was just looking for somewhat more generic information. If you’re looking for technical specs on some product, do you really care that I bought the neon green version of it? The traditional blog format of putting multiple entries on the front page and often the archives also tends to group information together inappropriately. You may have hit a blog page from searching for terms ‘foo’ and ‘bar’, but they might have been from completely separate, unrelated entries.

Potentially the more useful information on the net is now being buried in a sea of overranked blogs. I don’t know if this is really a trend overall though; this is just what I’ve noticed for a few topics on my own site. Anyone else noticed the same thing?