Google's New Search Algorithm

[Bryan Hancock]

So apparently Google changed their search algorithm yesterday in an effort to curb content farms, decrease the scoring for lower-ranked sites, etc. Does anyone know specifically what changed and what they are hoping this will do on the net?

[Jon Holdman]

They issued this press release. The don't say what they changed, but the intention is clear. They want to kick crummy sites out of business. I've seen several large sites that appear to have articles on a variety of topics. In fact, the content is just drivel that's almost useless. Its worse than useless when a search gets hijacked by these junk sites. I tried researching how to repair scooters a while back when my grandma was having problems with hers and couldn't get anyone to take a look at it. A majority of the hits were just useless junk.

We fight some of this here on BiggerPockets. SEO spammers come in and post repetitive junk from these content farms along with links. Bye bye.

I expect to see more and more sophistication along these lines. IBM's Watson, IMHO, is just a first step toward what we used to call the "UMR (my undergrad school) universal problem solver". In reality, many web searches aren't looking for a bunch of hits. They're looking for a clear, concise answer to a question. Much like Watson and Jeopardy. Even though Watson made some pretty glaring errors, it beat the pants off the two best human players. Now that its been proven you can build a program to understand natural language, understand the subtleties of the question and come up with the right answer, I expect to see big changes in the was search engines work. Sites that just pump out junk content to drive ad revenue are going to be put out of business.