This is awesome! Now if only I could completely remove certain sites from my search results ala the Google Wiki stuff. I'd love to drop swik, and expertsexchange and a few other annoying sites. Its possible this algorithm change will make these sites less annoying to me though.
Google algorithm change launched
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Re: Google algorithm change launched
#32Matt, I just went through my search history because i remembered a very specific instance of seeing this. Here's the query. http://www.google.com/search?q=nstoolbar+bottom+bar&ie=u... You'll notice that efreedom.com shows on the first page with content taken directly from stackoverflow. While stackoverflow does show in the results, the exact page that efreedom copies does not. Anyway, I'm glad you guys are taking thi…
did you try with &pws=0 (personalized search disable) option with the query? That solved the problem for me. I do not see efreedom on top for this query.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#33FYI: Don't flag this because there's no link or "citation". Matt Cutts is the web spam guy at Google.
Here's the accompanying link: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched/
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
UPDATE: I am even more surprised to see that when I logged out of my account and searched again on google.ie, one of the efreedom disappeared!! So, does this mean that Google search now takes into account my past search result clicks (or rather mis-clicks)? Or ranks contents in someway that proves efreedom is somehow more relevant to me?
If you're using personalized search, we do look at past clicks to change your ranking. So if you clicked on efreedom in the past, that could affect your ranking. You can add "&pws=0" (or use incognito mode in Chrome without logging in) to turn off personalized search and see whether that's the factor for you.
It's fairly trivial to add a custom search engine to chrome or ff that automatically appends
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#35Fantastic though I'd rather see google block sites like efreedom all together.
I think that would be a dangerous precedent to set. Whose opinion should decide what sites add value to content that may not be completely original? I'm not saying efreedom is not "being evil", but I could foresee someone somewhere using another's original content and making it more accessible. For example someone could easily improve the accessibility of the content from experts-exchange.com.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#36This is awesome! Now if only I could completely remove certain sites from my search results ala the Google Wiki stuff. I'd love to drop swik, and expertsexchange and a few other annoying sites. Its possible this algorithm change will make these sites less annoying to me though.
Second that. WTB ability to customize my search results by blacklisting certain sites. Big change I know, but would be a hugely useful service Google could provide.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#37Matt, this is great news.
How about sites that rank well with no content, just navigation? Here's an example:
http://www.collegegrad.com/entryleveljob/entrylevelaccountin...
It's generally a high quality site, but that page has absolutely no relevance to the query except for a title tag and some internal anchor text. The search terms aren't even on the page.
If I remember correctly, it used to rank #1 for "accounting entry level jobs," and now it's down to #8. My question is why is it even ranking at all? It's not even low quality content. It's no content.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#38Matt, I just went through my search history because i remembered a very specific instance of seeing this. Here's the query. http://www.google.com/search?q=nstoolbar+bottom+bar&ie=u... You'll notice that efreedom.com shows on the first page with content taken directly from stackoverflow. While stackoverflow does show in the results, the exact page that efreedom copies does not. Anyway, I'm glad you guys are taking thi…
It looks like we've got SO above efreedom for that query, but it's always nice to find a url that we didn't have that we'd like to be indexed. That lets us check whether we can improve our crawling/indexing. Thanks for the example!
This is why I love Hacker News.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#39Nice to hear about this change Matt. "Fuckin' efreedom..." is an oft heard missive around our office, godspeed in ranking them and their ilk down.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#40Glad to see that Matt went out of his way to help us geeks and the StackOverFlow community!
In the future is there going to be some way for webmasters to do something like rel="canonical" across domains so if I want to syndicate a piece of content across two properties I own I can indicate which one is the original source? My understanding is that rel="canonical" is only meant to be used between pages on the same root domain today but I could be mistaken.