By Kevin A. Stoda
Recently, Michael Pollitt published in the technical news section of The Guardian an article entitled “Why Google is the Service of Choice for Sploggers”. Not being one of the more hipper-campers in the technorati world of the internet, I hadn’t even known that there was now a word in English called “splog” nor that there were “sploggers” who created them. “Splog” is the word created by creating & combining”blogs”, in order to “spam” people who are harmlessly doing on-line searches. These “splogs” (or fake blogs) serve as covers for advertisements. Just as spammers make a lot of cash by spamming e-mails to poor unsuspecting e-mailing folks around the globe, “sploggers” spam the unsuspecting websearcher into certain websites that earn money for the “splogger” every time they or we, as unsuspecting researchers and surfers, either pass through or are diverted into their splog domains via (a) links on other splogs or by (b) clicking on the top results of an on-line search engine. Michael Pollitt notes that one wonderful website fully dedicated to ridding the web world of spam is known as “Splogfighter”. This site is at http://fightsplog.blogspot.com/ . According to Pollitt and several other web-reviewers, Splogfighter is one of the heroes of the world of blogging! The site has taken out millions of splogs in the past few years! However, both Pollitt and the Splogfighter also warn us that a single run-away splogger can create 60,000 to 250,000 within a year or so. Further, they both criticize GOOGLE and its AdSense promotion for it having historically demonstrated a lack of concern & seriousness in taking on many of the creators of splogs and their splogsites. Once I had become aware of “sploggers” existence in reading Pollitt’s Guardian piece, I also suddenly realized why it has been fairly difficult to find my own personal primary blog site using Google. My site is known as THE TEACHER and is at: http://the-teacher.blogspot.com/ . This splogger-phenomena at Google, explains to me the more than interesting, frustrating, and incidental fact that one can often find my own blog, THE TEACHER, and its writings (created on Google’s own THE BLOGGER website) much more easily by using YAHOO SEARCH tools than by using GOOGLE SEARCH tools. This seems to be an especially peculiar oddity as blogspot.com (also known as BLOGGER) is created and run by GOOGLE. Quite obviously, there must be a logical reason (besides humility) for GOOGLE to ignore its own blogs when creating a logarithm to generate search results. MY ONLINE EXPERIMENT Last April and May, I ran a trial to confirm this apparent lack of fairness in GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE weightings or in its logarithms related to its own SEARCH TOOLS. In carrying out the experiment, I sent out e-mails to everyone on my e-mail address to click on a few selected stories of mine published on GOOGLE’s Blog Spot website, THE TEACHER. Over the subsequent 3 weeks, I monitored any (a) increases in search results related to articles of mine on THE TEACHER blog and(b) the weightings of various THE TEACHER blog articles on the major search engines, i.e.
appearing in searches using GOOGLE, YAHOO, Ask Jeeves, and MSN.com , etc..
Within a few days of researching, it had become quite obvious that YAHOO was picking up the increased activity while GOOGLE was not.
Why was this the case?
At the time, I could only fathom that the main reason GOOGLE’s search engine was ignoring the increased BLOGGER or blogsite activity related to my articles on THE TEACHER bog was the result of its own search engine’s logarithm.
That is, both indirectly and by design, GOOGLE’s own AdSense advertisers as well as web researchers were being told not to post on my primary blogspot page due to the fact that my THE TEACHER site was guaranteed to have less traffic from GOOGLE than if the same surfer used YAHOO and plugged in the identical key words (related to my last name, title of article, or the article’s contents) into the search engine. This phenomena is easily explained because YAHOO and GOOGLE use different logarithms.
In summary, in contrast to GOOGLE, which ignored increased activity on my THE TEACHER blogspot site and it’s various articles during the three week trial period, YAHOO was finding and reporting 30% to 300% as many results when searching for me, or the various blogspot-published writings of mine.
GNN and GOOGLE
One other interesting caveat related to my findings and observations in my April and May 2007 study concerning my specific search engine enquiries is related to the fact that my secondary blog location is the GUERRILLA NEWS NETWORK at www.gnn.tv .
Meanwhile, most of the same articles (or almost identical articles), which I had published on my primary THE TEACHER blog of GOOGLE’s blogspot (and which had been ignored by GOOGLE serches), would show up on GOOGLE Search Results only if these articles had been republished by me on the Guerilla News Network: www.gnn.tv .
This, too, proved that GOOGLE searches appeared to have a bias against blogspot articles and blogs. Whereas, at the same time, GOOGLE seemed to prefer the same articles of mine if republished on www.gnn.tv . Naturally, GNN likely has greater circulation than blockspot articles currently—for whatever reason..
At first glance, this phenomena is also likely explained by the fact that THE TEACHER at http://the-teacher.blogspot.com/ is a site that is not found as easily on any search engine results as compared to the other GNN website of mine.
However, this second explanation is a circuitous one.
That is, let’s think counterfactually! If GOOGLE’s search engine logarithm had a bias towards (instead of against) its own blogspot sites, my blogspot would automatically be visited more often and weighted much higher than it currently is, especially after numerous peoples on three continents clicked in a fairly short period on selected varieties of articles of mine.
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