Online Search Quality- Changes in google web ranking algorithm

A step to correct Google search result, bits further has been taken. For some time, there have been criticism on the way Google search engine has been providing search result. Still, some set of Google users think that search result provided by Google Search Engine is biased to certain extent; attributed to the market maker i.e. the advertisers.

Last week Google fellow - Amit Singhal & Matt Cutts announced changes in its ranking algorithm which provides web search result & that it has impact on 11.8% of queries. The changes in consideration have been done to rectify those website which do not bring value to user.

Now these low-value-websites are loosely defined. Google considers them based on the extent of copying of content done from from other websites & few other things. The real valued/good quality sites are those which holds original contents, research materials, in-depth & thorough analysis, etc.

But isn't it something, which was expected in default from search engine?

Let's say there is a pharma company which has published research papers, in depth analysis, etc share on its websites. But the normal users of search engine may not want to see these complex or complicated research. Rather they would look for somebody's website (Say JeeV), who in turn would have inherited contents from this pharma company website (of course, I expect it to be done with proper references) but he would have published the same data but in a easy-to-understand way. I wouldn't wonder if JeeV's website gets higher ranks through search algorithm.

In such case, (given search keyword match) I would expect that the pharma company to get listed at the top of the search result but next ranked result would be by those who would have made it simpler & appealing.

Reading further in the google announcement, I sensed google has done 'pat self on the back' with the concurrence of results obtained from Personal Blocklist Chrome extension.

The Mask of Zoho

Last week, one of my friends told me about Zoho.com. Apparently he informed me that Zoho is Chennai (India) based company; which is partly untrue as Zoho is Peasanton, CA based company & probably, Zoho would have been carrying out significant delivery work from Chennai office; he had got such impression.

So, my impression after trying out few of Zoho's offerings - This company is going to change the way incumbents have been doing business for years. It has got so many products, solutions to offer and all of those are SaaS (available in cloud). As the statistics are gathered about zoho.com, it has touched multi million users base & growing.

I am sure, guys at Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com have well taken note of things happening at Zoho.com.

Google Public Data Explorer

Recently I came across another significant feature made available by Google. Google Public Data Explorer. Apparently, as per googleblog, this feature has been made available or googleblog has been making public data available to user since last couple of years :-) Nevertheless, now researchers, students even naive users will have one single place where data like...
1. Country-wise GDP
2. Statewise Unemployment rate in US
3. Various data released by autonomous bodies, international bodies like IMF, etc
etc

• Even more to feature is; These data can be visualized in various forms like charts, etc
• One can add his own data conforming to open standard like Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL) which is in a xml form (I guess, publishing of such submitted data would ultimately subject to satisfaction/approval of google team)

I am yet to explore it further. But somehow I feel, though with this feature google has made available users; an utility to access publicly avaiable data; to me, it can also be seen as an encirculment attempt

where, the facilitator will store data & will get it growing over the period. And once data grows over the period, it becomes an asset to organization on which it can easily capitalize. And Google is well known for this :-)

Government has no Magical Lamp

It happened one more time.

Yesterday, Finance Minister Pranab Mukharjee said, government has taken necessary steps to tame inflation, but it does not have Aladdin's Magical lamp to resolve things immediately.

• I remember him saying the same thing in early January 2011
• Last time, he indicated, the future course of action would be taken Reserve Bank
• RBI in line with general perception & growth pressure raised benchmark rates to moderate 25 basis points. And this moderate hike has not helped so far to bring down the inflation (read WPI and specifically essential commodity)
• Somehow, I think, RBI should take a preemptive steps in near future & tweak benchmark policy rates
• Hoarding of food commodity is raging off-and-on with different items, it started with 'daal', onion, now edible oils.
• The Indian Economy at large will have implied effect of radical changes happening in political sphere of Egypt