Google and the “blog noise problem”

Andrew Orlowski writes in “Google to fix blog noise problem” that Google is taking steps to change their algorithms to avoid skew caused by blogs. Personally, I find this kind of crazy. I use Google all the time, and have great success in finding what I’m looking for. Blogs generally link to content produced by others, so it seems to me that they do a good job of boosting content that is valuable. Maybe Google’s algorithms give too much preference to blogs if there is a “recentness” part of their scoring algorithm, but on the whole I think they do a good job of results. Something to consider, too, is that many blogs include not only links to other things, but original writing that is often very useful.

One thing that I can agree with is that you wouldn’t want Trackback links to influence rankings. The Google folks are pretty smart, and I think they can deal with that problem without eliminating blog entries from search results entirely.