小網頁也可以排第一
大家都”知道”, 大的網站在搜索結果出現的機會比較高, 小的網站卻可能被排到第五六頁或是更後面. 不過最近研究出來說, 其實現在的search engine真的會去看keywords, 不會因為多人去那網站就覺得那個網站友好的資料. 意思說, 只要你的網站資料 relevant to search the users’ queries, 小網站也可以在Google搜尋結果的第一頁出現!
對了, 如果你在google.com查 “Wii 價錢“, search results 的第一頁排第一個網站應該是連到這個 ET… Blob :o 其實我那個post也沒有講到什麼價錢, 只寫了 Wii 會比 PS3 便宜, 這樣也可以排第一… =.= 真是搞不懂他們的algorithm…..
(NewScientist.com)
Small sites boosted by search engines too
22:00 07 August 2006
Kurt Kleiner
The suspicion that search engines exacerbate online inequalities, by directing more traffic to websites that are already popular, appears to be misplaced.
Rather than simply boosting traffic to big sites, the research suggests search engines help smaller, less popular sites get noticed.
Filippo Menczer, a computer scientist at Indiana University, US, who carried out the study, says popular sites clearly benefit from their own popularity. “There is a rich-gets-richer dynamic on the web,” he told New Scientist. “The question is whether search engines amplify it or mitigate it.”
Research has previously shown that the internet is a “scale-free network”, meaning only a small number of websites are linked to lots of other sites, while most link to just a few. As most major search engines rank websites based on the number of other sites that link to those being ranked, this has fuelled concerns about search bias.
Vicious circle
Some worry this could initiate a vicious circle in which popular pages are ranked higher in search results, causing more people link to them and making them appear even higher in future search queries.
Critics have dubbed this a “Googlearchy” and suggest it could distort online commerce, technical innovation, and even political discourse. However, Menczer’s research suggests such fears are unfounded.
Using data from a traffic-tracking firm called Alexa, Menczer and colleagues found that search engines actually help less popular sites gain traffic. Alexa’s data provided only an approximation of search traffic, as search engines like Google keep their traffic patterns secret.
Menczer’s team found that web-linking bias is often offset by the fact that search queries refer to very specific information. Small sites may fit the search criteria much better than big sites even if they are far less linked to.
Popularity curve
For instance, searching Google for “apple” brings up the homepage of Apple Computer in the top spot because so many other web pages link to the Apple homepage. However, searching for “jonagold apple” brings up the much less popular New York Apple Association website, as this is more relevant to this query.
Bigger sites are still more likely to get more hits than smaller sites, Menczer says. But using a search engine will reveal about 20% more web pages compared to simply browsing the internet by following web links, he adds.
“It implies that just the in-links don’t necessarily give you the high ranking that you might think,” says C. Lee Giles, a computer scientist at Penn State University in the US. “You can still have a fairly high ranking if there’s a lot of specificity. It’s very exciting for people at the low end of the popularity curve.”
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas)
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