Thursday, May 11, 2006

Google Search Engine Rankings - Just a High School Popularity Contest

A recent article about the effects of peer pressure on music popularity and stocks (stock market) popularity appeared in

http://news.morningstar.com/article/article.asp?id=162973

While the article discusses music and stocks, another example would be the fallacy of Google's search engine page ranking and display algorithm.

The most popular pages get more hits and links to them, which bumps them higher in Google's rankings, which means they get more hits and links to them, which bumps them higher...

Google's vaunted ranking "methodology" is no more sophisticated than a high school popularity contest.