How Google Gets It Wrong
I have an avid interest in search engines and search algorithms. If you've been following my blog for any time at all, you know this.
It's commonly known that the Big Three search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) base their ranking of results primarily on one thing: links. Yes, the documents need to be relevant to the search query, but after meeting that criteria it's the quantity and quality of links to a document that lands it in the top spot for any given set of keywords.
While links are a great way to provide a baseline of trust or authority, links are not the only way a document should be judged.
Here's an example of how using links as the primary ranking factor fails. Go to Google (or Bing) and search for:
You'll see the #1 result is RadioLovers.com. It's a very popular site because it offers a lot of downloads of old time radio shows in MP3 format.
That's great if that's what you were after, but what if you were actually wanting to read about Old Time Radio? In that case RadioLovers.com is a terrible #1 result -- it's mostly just a list of links.
The #2 result in Google isn't any better (Otr.net) -- it's all links.
In fact, if you go through each of the top 10 results in Google for "old time radio" you'll see that, with the exception of the Wikipedia entry that comes in at #9, there's very little information about Old Time Radio in any of the results!
Thus the failure of using links as the primary method for ranking web sites becomes clearer.
In some cases using links is perfect, such as when looking for the official web site of a particular company. Search for "Microsoft" at Google and you'll get Microsoft.com -- even though there's very little information on the home page. But if you searched for "Microsoft" in the hope of getting some information about the company, that doesn't start until Google's fourth result (the Wikipedia entry for Microsoft).
That got me thinking: while links are a great way to establish a measure of trust or authority, wouldn't it be better to have an alternative ranking method that puts sites that offer the most information first?
What I'd like to do is:
1. Pull the top 30 results from Google (or Bing or Yahoo).
2. Gather up all of the information in all of those top 30 documents.
3. Score each document to see how much of the overall body of knowledge was covered in each document.
So, for instance, if a particular web page contained 80% of the information covered by the top 30 results, that's the web page I'd want at #1 because it covers most of the information found in all 30 documents. Number two would be the next best coverage, and so on.
That would mean that I'd have to visit a lot fewer pages to get a great overall understanding of a topic.
This method would also be great for news items, since it would list the news article with the best overall coverage of a topic first -- saving a lot of time reading multiple articles to try and get a balanced or complete picture.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Well, stop day-dreaming, because it's a reality! I've incorporated the methodology listed above into my search engine, Shablast:
Click here to go to Shablast.com
Now, when you enter a query into Shablast and select either "Standard" or "News" from the drop-down list next to the keyword field, Shablast will score the top 30 Bing results using the methodology listed above and sort the results to show the web pages/news articles with the best coverage first.
Search Shablast for "old time radio" in Standard mode and RadioLovers.com comes in at #13 because it only contains 19% of the overall body of knowledge contained in the top 30 results. The #1 result is MysteryShows.com, which contains 64%, followed by the Wikipedia article at #2 with 56%.
Search Shablast for "Microsoft" and the #1 result is the CNet.com news page dedicated to Microsoft because it contains a whopping 84% of all the information contained in the top 30 results for "Microsoft."
The top 30 results are pulled from Bing using their awesome API. The advantage of using the Bing API is that links still play a part. It takes a lot of links to get into the top 30 results for major keywords, which ensures a certain level of trust or authority. But then Shablast examines those top 30 documents and resorts them to show the documents with the best coverage first.
Why not give it a try and let me know what you think, either in a comment on this post or by discussing Shablast at the Shablast discussion forum?
Enjoy this article?
September 7th, 2010 - 06:45
Awesome, you really know your stuff Jon!Thank you
September 3rd, 2010 - 02:00
Wow, that sure is a mixed bag of feedback for Shablast. I’m no nearer having a view on it so I guess I’d better try it. What strikes me though is that it might work better for the long tail, as – like Boris says – term like ‘Old Time Radio’ are not that specific. Even if Shablast has some teething problems, big respect to Jonathan for taking on the Big G, and as long as we never rely on purely one source of traffic, (including Google) we should all be moving forward.
August 30th, 2010 - 23:11
I think SEs get it right most of the time and your argument for proving them wrong is not as strong as it should be. What if people were not looking for info on Old Time Radio but instead were looking for shows, then Google got it right.
August 30th, 2010 - 02:17
As we all know link building is one of the big factor for SEO and to one of my old email account I get loads of mails asking for link exchange on various industries. Btw, I have no idea how the email id has been spread out…..
August 25th, 2010 - 16:19
This sounds like an interesting solution, but as others have mentioned, what about when people aren’t looking for information? The real trick to improving search results is determining exactly what people are looking for when a term can mean multiple things. Still I could see this information based algorithm being very handy for certain searches.
August 17th, 2010 - 22:20
Hi Jon
Once again a great post and I will try out your search engine and see how it works for me.
Cheers
August 6th, 2010 - 05:37
Jonathan, i think in order to retrieve relevant information, the keywords must be more specific. Example “old time radio” is a broad keyword which means i want either download music or get more information on old time radio, so without more specific keyword, it would be hard for Google to understand search query.
I think keyword qualifiers need to be added to make keyword more specific and for example of keyword “old time radio”, it would make sense to add “download” as qualifier to let search engine understand if user wants to download and add qualifier “information” or “info” to let search engine understand if a user wants to find more information.
August 5th, 2010 - 14:15
My cousin recommended this blog and she was totally right keep up the fantastic work!
August 3rd, 2010 - 15:57
This is very funny–but very very true.
Actually recently, one of my clients website had their Title on a SERP changed because google didn’t like their title tag (it contained a URL)…
Now Google changed their Title on the SERP but just so happened to misspell my clients name…it took them over 2 weeks to fix this mistake, something my client was not happy about.
However–I was happy knowing that google made a mistake = p
August 3rd, 2010 - 09:42
What an interesting find… Kudos to you for letting us know there’s other ways to search out there! The summary search was a little strange, though – not sure why it only pulled up 3 or 4 results.
Like some others have said, I searched for my own keywords and found totally different results than those popping up on Big G.
August 1st, 2010 - 18:07
Hi Mr. Leger,
I left a message with Amin M for you concerning a business proposition concerning the IAF and a potential application in medical education in the US.
Kindly drop me an email for more information.
All the best
scramblemd
July 28th, 2010 - 11:20
Jonathan, Do you think Google will suffer the same fate as Yahoo as social media evolves. Have you seen what they are doing at nowrelevant.com?
July 27th, 2010 - 20:06
Sheblast is really cool great job with that first off. Second off the Google dance is all to familiar to most us Internet marketers. Like you said the more relevant links you have the better, and the longer your website, or blog will stay ranked in the search engines.
July 26th, 2010 - 18:27
Jon,
Using the following information from your post:
“Search Shablast for “old time radio” in Standard mode and RadioLovers.com comes in at #13 because it only contains 19% of the overall body of knowledge contained in the top 30 results. The #1 result is MysteryShows.com, which contains 64%, followed by the Wikipedia article at #2 with 56%.”
If I create an interesting site with content that contains 85% of the overall body of knowledge contained in the top 30+ results but I am not in the top 30 results because I just published the site. How does your formula deal with moving my site into position?
If by day two I am recognized as possessing 85% of the overall body of knowledge contained in the top 30+ results but I am an unseasoned site,(just two days old) what position would I acquire using your algorithm? It seems that I should be number 1. I could be potentially replacing a site that has been in the number 1 position for years.
Or, conversely, by not being in the top 30 I may never be considered as a prospect for the top 30.
As to Google injustice for where they put the number one position, and the qualities thereof, often times I am faced with a search that brings in the number one position a site that has just a few links, say 4, and a page full of tags that are not click-able and do not offer the searcher, once clicked through to the site, a way to progress short of the back button. Yet they are in the vaunted number one position for a much searched term.
I have felt that this was particularly unfair when I know there are many sites that actually contain good, interesting information.
Google does not like to hear about these things, they offer no suggestions as to why this has happened or what must be done to change the situation.
Donald
July 26th, 2010 - 00:40
I guess it’s tough because Google can’t tell what the intention is of the searcher. Are they searching for news, doing research, want to buy products what? For example if you go to your SE and search “upscale pet accessories” a press release comes up. Great if you want info on this but not so great if you want to buy some products.
It’s probably only a matter of time until Google installs it’s search engine into our brain anyway.
July 25th, 2010 - 11:08
It’s a grand idea, though I think SEs get it right most of the time and your argument for proving them wrong is not as strong as it should be. What if people were not looking for info on Old Time Radio but instead were looking for shows, then Google got it right.
Then again, it would be almost impossible to satisfy everybody’s whims, so I guess that’s why there are that many SEs (Shablast included) to choose from.
July 25th, 2010 - 02:24
Interesting thing you created Jon. You’re always so full of creative ideas that make people’s lives easier!
Keep more coming!
Welly Mulia
July 24th, 2010 - 10:36
I liked shablast so much I wrote a simple recommendation for it on my site.
Thanks for the effort you put into helping people Jonathan
July 23rd, 2010 - 16:43
Jon,
You have come up with a very useful tool. I believe it will be useful to more that just the IM crowd. Everyone who searches for solid info prefers good content to fluff, ads, etc.
I think you should seriously develop it, then sell it to someone for big bucks in a year. And don’t forget to thank me for giving you the idea.
; )
July 23rd, 2010 - 15:26
You do have some marvelous toys. Is this latest creation a LSI search engine? Will these top ten lists of sites produce lists of theme words (Williams) capable of bumping the existing Google favorites for a keyword? I will do some testing on my own. Have you done any research into this aspect?
July 23rd, 2010 - 07:23
Hi Jon Honestly I believe what you are doing now with you search engine shablast is great. Even though it’s new but it gather information that is useful solid information for internet user
July 23rd, 2010 - 04:04
This is what I always wondered. If content is King then how come for certain keywords the top high ranking sites are those who either no or little content regarding that keyword topic. Most popular shopping websites only images, price and may title of a product but they still rank high.
July 23rd, 2010 - 00:29
Jonathan, I’ve had several Google search results similar to the one you described on your post, i.e., the site with relevant, useful information showed up somewhere between positions 6 to 10. And sometimes it even happened that Google’s first page didn’t list any website/page with relevant information on the subject/keyword researched.
However, I find that there’s been a lot of improvement in Google’s search results along the time.
July 23rd, 2010 - 00:14
I bookmarked Shablast – the summary option will be a great tool for researching articles. Thank you so much for all your hard work on this – and thank you for sharing! Dee Ross
July 22nd, 2010 - 22:03
Great post and awesome comments I’ve enjoy reading them all.
July 22nd, 2010 - 20:11
An excellent concept, Jonathan, thanks. I just idly typed in one of my site’s primary key phrases and found about 10 sites out of the 30 returned that I have never even seen before (and I have been in this niche nearly eight years now). Wow, Google doesn’t always have it right, do they?
I like the idea of not overemphasizing links per se, becuase one of the “big daddy” sites in my ‘space’ is, essentially, a huge link farm and Google continually ignores this and blithely keeps ranking it at the top.
Also, I’m keen on any search engine that doesn’t make Wikipedia its Holy grail of search. Don’t get me wrong, I like Wikiedia and use it often, but when I search for a specific term I don’t want Wikipedia continually jamming into the results … Google is so “in love” with Wikipedia they resemble a librarian who when you ask for help finding a specific book, continually parrots out the phrase, “Look in the encyclopedia”.
We already know it’s on the shelf, ma’am, we asked for something more specific.
Keep on innovating.
July 22nd, 2010 - 18:18
i love the idea and can see how this could be helpful but the look of it makes me not want to use it or read what is on the pages. Can you fix that.
July 22nd, 2010 - 14:10
Jon,
I love the thinking behind this.
I’ve tried it out on a few search terms, and so far, it seems to work pretty well.
I definitely think it will pay dividends when researching article content.
Thanks,
Mark
July 22nd, 2010 - 13:44
Good stuff…
Just an “anonymous” note to say I really like your search tools like shablast and gistweb, but really can’t use them seriously, because they record and display my search terms and research results for the “whole world” to see.
Not really so worried about the “whole world” per se, just the “competition”, eh?
I do use your tools for generic type keywords and general info, but anything sensitive? No way!
Just wouldn’t do for many sensitive, and very targeted, subjects, no?
Any chance of some sort of private search feature?
Again, good stuff – and thought you deserved some “real” feedback.
Thanks!
Bless you
July 22nd, 2010 - 12:06
Hi Jon,
You always have excellent ideas and I like your work.
I exchanged emails with your desktop service guy last night about IAF and a proposal that might interest you.
Let me know what your thoughts are
July 22nd, 2010 - 12:05
Hi Jonathan,
Interesting concept, I’ve searched for my keyword and I really
don’t understand how your search engine works… It’s pulling
up pages that I have never seen before and pages that have nothing to do
with our keyword, I have also found some of the listing to have pages that
are not found.
Maybe I’m missing what you are trying to do… But I think I have a good understanding!
Great Concept though!
Jimmy
July 22nd, 2010 - 11:44
New logic, gives a new way
I think ur idea is pretty good and would have been better if you could sort out top 50 articles from google , bing and yahoo combined or rather only google because it is still the best.
But the way you have sort gives a way up for lengthy site articles rather than relevant ones
Relevant search is most important because all time we do not search broad words.
what if we search
how to improve my website by decreasing the server load
??etc
July 22nd, 2010 - 10:01
Hi Jonathan,
Normally I would be very keen on your products, but in this case you may have overlooked a possible problem.
If, for examle, I search on Shablast for the term ‘Printed Balloons Northern Ireland’ I get some very strange results, the first one being a page from Gumtree! I checked this page and the only mention of balloons on it is on an advert at the bottom of the page. The page has a lot of info on it about video, chair covers, photos, etc (wedding type stuff). Now I would think that this info is going to skew the expected content for the search, your algoritim will be expecting to see all these orther bits of info and will then rank pages that have it higher than they deserve.
Not sure I have explained this well or understand the process for that matter.
Good Luck
Jim
July 22nd, 2010 - 09:57
I love your search engine, but after I played around with it a bit. A bit being 3 hour’s. I noticed your result’s are dramatically improved by surrounding the phrase with quotes. Yes, I understand how quote’s effect searching, so I don’t need info on that.
Maybe it would work better to treat all searches as if they were surrounded by quote’s by default? Just a thought. Great job!
July 22nd, 2010 - 09:50
Thank you for bringing this out to light. It is really frustrating, especially doing research, to be greeted with page after page of scanty or even irrelevant content. The only two true content websites that keep coming up on page one, it appears, are Wikipedia and About.com. Those two have tons of backlinks anyway: you know, the same thing.
As an example, one of my niches is online dating. When I do a search on Google using certain adult dating keywords, Yahoo Personals keeps popping up in the number or two positions. Yet Yahoo Personals does not even allow anything remotely related to adult content!
This shows just how some of the search engine algorithms really suck. It should be about relevancy (read content) first and everything else second. I hope you teach the big guys how to do their job or, even better, beat them.
July 22nd, 2010 - 09:48
Hey Jonathan,
I wanted to say, you should expect a pretty heavy flow of traffic today, since you just showed up as ‘trending’ on my Alexa toolbar news. Hope you’re cached and ready
Shablast looks interesting..I’ll give it a try
July 22nd, 2010 - 09:41
Nice work, John!
I’m user of TBS and IAF and you can be sure I’ll bookmark your search engine, because I see a great potential. And we can use it, because now we can find (a little) easily articles covering enough a desired keyword.
Nice, keep up your good work!
July 22nd, 2010 - 09:39
It almost seems like this is a biography search engine. It pretty much returns a bio on anything you type in.
July 22nd, 2010 - 09:35
Hi Jonathan;
I like what I see. I will try it out a few times, and comment further.
Thanks.
Don
July 22nd, 2010 - 09:07
Nice find Jon. Google is flooded with websites fighting to outrank each other.
Often I find myself getting better and more reliable information from websites 10 pages deep than those on the first page in Google search result .
July 22nd, 2010 - 08:59
Hey Jonathan,
Thanks for an extremely informative post. I checked out Shablast, and I like it. Simply because the truly informative websites are in the right positions. Now, I only did a few searches, but the listings were very good. I say that, to say this.
Even before I got involved in online marketing, I noticed that many a website that had a high poition in Google rankings didn’t seem to belong there. Google says that their goal is to give their users the best quality information.
They talk about content, authority, navigation, and other things that they say will make using their service more enjoyable. Long story short, very crappy websites in top postions. I’ve seen websites that had very little to do with what I was searching for, or nothing to do with the subject matter at all, occupy a top spot.
Many of these sites would just be filled with a whole lot of ads. Google is a wonderful tool, and they do have a monumental task before them, but it is high time that they got it right.
Thanks, and God bless.
July 22nd, 2010 - 08:56
Hi Jon,
Just wondering, was this just a research project, or are you going to market Shablast to the masses?
Allen
July 22nd, 2010 - 08:33
I have to say that your search engine will definitely help me to form new articles on any subject especially from the summary seach. You are really coming up with some great stuff lately. Those that have given shablast a negative response have not seen the potential that it holds.
Great job as usual!
July 22nd, 2010 - 08:30
Was not you the guy who had another search engine based on Bing? I think current search engines are fine in proving me the relevant search results. I was never disappointed. I thin we don’t need another search engine that just manipulates Bing results.
July 22nd, 2010 - 07:23
Biswajit:
Umm… ‘off page seo’ is hardly a news-relevant query.
July 22nd, 2010 - 07:13
I used your shablast with my keyword ‘off page seo’ and chose the option news. I hardly got any relevant result.
I think, Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search still rock!
July 22nd, 2010 - 07:13
I like the concept Jon and the experiment. I’ve found that Google’s results are often polluted with the pages of marketers who have learned how to game Google’s algo.
This is particularly bad for most health or medical-related searches where accurate and reliable information is vital. Unfortunately, more often than not, I’ll find the first page of SERPs littered with sites pushing varous affiliate offers or spammy MFA sites.
I’ve long since learned to modify my search queries to only pull in results from .edu, .gov, and .org TLDs first where doing health and medical-related searches. Granted, a very imperfect approach, but it at least provides some degree of spam filtering.
I think Sablast is a good first step in providing a frontend filter for search results. I’ve got it bookmarked and will be comparing it with what Google returns.
Rich
July 22nd, 2010 - 07:02
Jonathan.
Any chance of getting ShaBlast integrated into the Firefox search box or info of how to do it?
Wayne.
July 22nd, 2010 - 06:33
Hi Jonathon,
This is a fantastic idea, I’ll be using it for my research in future. I especially like it because it eanks my site above the biggest one in my niche (fractional ownership) although since we are ranked 12 and 13 there is clearly work still to do
Oh and it got the number 1 result for this niche spot on.
I notice in my niche a number of quite thin sites ranking well. When I trawled through their links (to see if I could get some from the same place) it was obvious that they had bought almost all of them. When you see many blogs in totally unrelated fields linking to a site in their footer you know what’s going on
Sadly it seems like Google doesn’t!
Many thanks
July 22nd, 2010 - 06:19
Hi Jon. I did a few searches for some of my keywords. For several key terms, you definitely have it right. Of course, Bing has it wrong in some cases to begin with, but that’s another discussion.
This brings up more questions than answers for me, though, as I’m not sure what it is you’re comparing. I’m also not sure how you’re comparing it. For example, could I game your system by plagiarizing the text from those top 30 pages?
Also, I’m not clear if you’re taking into account just a single page (you mention the top 30 documents), or the site itself. If you have a topic that needs to be broken up into many pages and is extensively covered throughout the site, you’d have to crawl the entirety of the sites and then compare all of the pages.
If you don’t do this, then my guess is that a page that has little actual content on the subject but acts as an index/pointer to the pages that contain the detail (in other words, Tier 2 pages on the site pointing to Tier 3′s with subtopics) would do poorly, even though all those pages taken together might be the better choice. Also, if that’s true, then I could game your system by having fewer, longer pages, instead of breaking them up.
Lastly, while this is an interesting experiment, I’m wondering what the value is here. If your intent is to compete with Bing, what’s to stop Bing from offering alternative results in this format? I’m guessing you have different plans.
-Kurt Schmitt
July 22nd, 2010 - 06:08
Neither mysteryshows.com nor rusc.com offers any information on what old time radio is, at least I didn’t find much by browsing the homepages of the sites.
You have to go to #3 Wikipedia to find information on Old Time Radio.
Of course this is my view and I’m not familiar with old time radio as a topic.
I think one of the things needed in a good search engine is for the search engine to ask additional questions to get a better understanding of what the user is actually searching for.
Typing “old time radio” could mean
Information on “old time radio” (what is it really? research)
Listen to “old time radio” shows
Find resources, links to old time radio sites
Find people interested in “old time radio”
There is no way (except maybe spying on search history) for the search engine to know that that user is looking for without asking some followup questions.
Simon
SecretSearchEngineLabs.com
July 22nd, 2010 - 05:57
From the discussion I know that it seems very complicated and still confused. But it’s very great article that gives me some new sight.
July 22nd, 2010 - 05:01
Very interesting. I must say, as am IMer who would much prefer to just build large authoritative sites filled with quality content than to spend time on artifical link building, I’d love it if Google worked on the same principle as your search engine (great tool btw).
As it is, I’ll carry on building links because I need to make money, but hopefully Google will move away from putting so much emphasis on them eventually.
July 22nd, 2010 - 04:30
Hi Jon,
Excellent post! I went straight away and used Shablast because I am in the process of creating a website and blog marketing pet products. I found results on Shablast that I never came across on Google or Yahoo – Thank you so much!
Also, loving TBS!
ta
July 22nd, 2010 - 04:13
I have found that Google does get it right most of the time with the searches that I do. There are times when they don’t get it perfect, but no single system is going to be the best thing for every single user.
Perhaps having a combination of links and usable content would be an improvement and getting it right would then happen more often.
Unfortunately, any search engine cannot be all things to all people. As long as it provides the information that we are looking for most of the time, who can complain? Also, if they had to make changes as you suggest, we would all have to look for other ways to get our sites to rank on the first page!! – and these may not be as comparatively easy as just building links.
Thanks for discussing your point of view.
July 22nd, 2010 - 03:51
John,
Super results is all I can say. Are you working on this program for release? Man you always have great ideas and results.
July 22nd, 2010 - 03:49
Shablast seems an intersting search engine. Infact I just tried with few of the words and got much better results than Google. Great job Jon! Love it>
July 22nd, 2010 - 03:49
Hi Jonathan,
I remember and old post where you asked everyone that same question, how should the results show up.
The best way would be human editing, or human voting, but its close to be unreal with the millions of pages added every second.
Quickly enough someone would manipulate the voting with some software..
You place a good question what do we look for in a search engine 100% information or relevance. I like the Google way trying to understand what I was looking for even when it is not searched directly.
July 22nd, 2010 - 03:47
like your reply to lalalala… so true
Google talks about good user experience, but you are suggesting that people who want actual info about a topic do not always find it easily with the big G
July 22nd, 2010 - 03:40
Jonathan,
I used your search engine Shablast and I love it! This is a terrific way to search for information. I found exactly what I was looking for. Can’t thank you enough.
July 22nd, 2010 - 03:39
Taking on Google for search… you are thinking big!
July 22nd, 2010 - 03:11
Thanks for the insight into a complex beast.
I knew links were important (we all did), but now you have given a great way to display this to be true.
Dwayne
July 22nd, 2010 - 02:50
Love it! A great research tool.
July 22nd, 2010 - 02:47
Hi John,
you kinda made my day!
I’ve been frustrated with my Google ranking lately – I’m down on page 4 or so for my target keywords, so I was pretty excited when I tried your shablast link and found my site there as the only summary result for ‘wedding photographer melbourne’! Now if I could only get google to do the same thing
July 22nd, 2010 - 02:37
Looks like a nice search engine. I will be using shablast for a week to see how it goes. Keep us updated.
July 22nd, 2010 - 02:09
Jonathan
a very interesting project , how are you determining algorithmically which page is the most informative for a particular keyword?
Tried it out for a smaller niche and got some interesting results!
July 22nd, 2010 - 02:09
The problem is that if you key in a search like “old time radio” and don’t get what you want the first try, it means you need to tweak your keywords, such as “history of old time radio shows” or “history of radio” or “information about old time radio,” or something else that is more specific.
As for Google changing their methods away from backlinks hurting all the SEO folks, people need to remember that Google has been trying to dussuade people from link building to game the search engines in the first place. “Content is king” and all that. SEO based on dodgy practices {anything artificial} is building your castle on sand. Build a highly informative site and people will look to it as a resource naturally.
July 22nd, 2010 - 02:08
Jonathan
This is really thought provoking and brings some fascinating results.
One curious thing though .. it doesn’t seem to cope conventionally with negative keywords.
For example search for my name/business on Google and two people dominate the search pages .. myself and the hockey gaolie at Sacred Heart in the US. Put -hockey in the Google search and it excludes the hockey player .. do that with Shablast and the hockey player domiinates your seaches.
Only if I search “Stefan Drew” NOT hockey does Shablast show my own marketing business.
This isn’t a criticism of your product .. I think it is great .. just a note about the way it needs to be used.
Stefan
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:58
Your search engine is based on bing and it takes a while to get indexed on bing therefore you are missing out on fresh content some of which is authoritative. Your search engine is nice and clean tho!
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:41
Hi Jon,
Great thinking for coming out with Shablast. First time I ever heard of it. Will this be something BIG G and the others be doing in the near future? I bet you’re ahead of them lot…
But how is it going to help us make more money?
Cheers!
Mike
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:41
Hey Jon
I’m no expert or anything but Shablast sounds like it would be a very cool tool to do research for articles and website content for niche sites.
I’ll definitely give it a spin
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:40
Very interesting Jonathan…well, I did check out Shablast.com and it does seem to throw up a good body of results. I wonder though why, when I search with a keyword, say “Microsoft,” Microsoft.com is not among the top listings. I was expecting it to be the topmost result, assuming that a company’s official site would contain a large body of info about the company…or am I missing a point?
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:39
I searched using Indonesian keyword. The result is misserable for the first 6 position. None is even readable. I guess if you could add “readability” measure to this, your search engine will be another incredible product of yours
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:26
Never heard of Shablast but people are too much influenced by BIG G.
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:24
I really like this topic and it helped me a lot and the double ranking points are very helpful . this will help me in my work.
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:18
Great post Jonathan. You did a great job dissecting Google’s ranking methods. But I want to congratulate even more fore putting shablast.com together. Good stuff my friend
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:12
Chris:
Here’s the kicker — Wikipedia doesn’t come out on top nearly as much as you’d think! that’s because Wikipedia doesn’t cover the body of knowledge found in the top 30 documents nearly as well as many other documents — even though the Wiki entries are so long.
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:08
Sound idea Jonathan – only problem is that Wikipedia will almost always come out top as it usually has the longest and most detailed single pages about any subject.
There is a world of difference between volume of information and readability and the old Google idea of the SearchWiki – where individuals effectively vote on entries – is perhaps a better one.
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:06
Amazing. I have had the same thought, primarily for researching a new niche. I want to get max info without having to weed through dozens of sites. This can save tons of time. You Rock!
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:01
I love this, Jon! I didn’t know about Shablast. Will go check it out. It is frustrating when you have done your homework and written a really informative article, but find all these junk listings taking over the first page.
July 22nd, 2010 - 01:00
lalalalalalalalalalalaaaaaa:
I admit, if Google got it right every time those of us who have learned to influence the search results to our own benefit would be in trouble!
July 22nd, 2010 - 00:56
I hear ya but I don’t agree with your article at all…. Google gets it right most of the time and the fact that they take the anchor text in the links is a great for US INTERNET MARKETERS to influence the serps even by a lil.
If google was to move completely to a trustrank + pr algo + human editing… our link building efforts would get screwed at some point….
July 22nd, 2010 - 00:56
great idea!
as often with good ideas – its targeted to the english speaking world. would enjoy a service where you could select country and language…
Urs
July 22nd, 2010 - 00:54
Great post on SEO John. I myself am a SEO nerd;)
July 22nd, 2010 - 00:51
Hey Jon, I love reading your posts, very informative but i dont know much about the algorithms of the search engines.
I just got your IAF software and I must say I love it, keep up the great work