eclectica
2004-01-22, 21:18
Old search engines relied on the frequency of a word in a website to sort the results by relevance. Website owners would get their results posted first by putting a lot of the words in the source of the html of their web pages using meta tags. On this site here that we are on, there are the meta tags:
<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft">
Yet I didn't put any of those there. They came with vBulletin and I never altered them. The reason why is that I don't feel like playing games with search engines. They can play my game and do their job correctly, but I refuse to play their game and alter the site so that they discover it. Some people try to manipulate search results by changing the meta tags. For example, the ES5 forum has as its meta tags:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="peer 2 peer, p2p, es5, sharepro, p2p forum, file share, fileshare, person 2 person, filesharing, data transfer, download, downloads, piracy, flame, kazaa, klite, free, pxp, fileshare forums, proxy, proxys, proxies, kazaa, morpheus, blubster, udp search, protocol, network, networking, anonymous, piracy, warez, key generators">
The hope of the webmaster who designed that page is that people searching for those words will then stumble upon their web page, because the search engine will put it higher on the list.
Google lists the relevance of its results based on how many sites link to it. That is intended to avoid being manipulated by meta tags and commercialized p0rn site spammers. Unfortunately then that means that a site will be considered irrelevant if no one links to it, even if within that site there is a wealth of information. People are able to manipulate Google's search results using a process called "Google bombing". It's accomplished by having a few different sites link to a site. So instead of using a prolific amount of meta tags, Google bombing is done by having a prolific amount of sites linking to another site in order to get priority of relevance. Suppose for example that I want president Bush's biography (http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html) to come up when people search for the words "miserable failure". I would do that by encouraging a few people I know to put something like this on their web pages:
miserable failure (http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html)
If several people did that on the index pages of their websites, then a Google search for "miserable failure" would then have Bush's site come up. That has been successfully done in fact, as you can see by these search results:
miserable failure (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=miserable+failure&sa=N&tab=nw)
Now use quotes and then Michael Moore tops the list:
"miserable failure" (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=%22miserable+failure%22)
<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft">
Yet I didn't put any of those there. They came with vBulletin and I never altered them. The reason why is that I don't feel like playing games with search engines. They can play my game and do their job correctly, but I refuse to play their game and alter the site so that they discover it. Some people try to manipulate search results by changing the meta tags. For example, the ES5 forum has as its meta tags:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="peer 2 peer, p2p, es5, sharepro, p2p forum, file share, fileshare, person 2 person, filesharing, data transfer, download, downloads, piracy, flame, kazaa, klite, free, pxp, fileshare forums, proxy, proxys, proxies, kazaa, morpheus, blubster, udp search, protocol, network, networking, anonymous, piracy, warez, key generators">
The hope of the webmaster who designed that page is that people searching for those words will then stumble upon their web page, because the search engine will put it higher on the list.
Google lists the relevance of its results based on how many sites link to it. That is intended to avoid being manipulated by meta tags and commercialized p0rn site spammers. Unfortunately then that means that a site will be considered irrelevant if no one links to it, even if within that site there is a wealth of information. People are able to manipulate Google's search results using a process called "Google bombing". It's accomplished by having a few different sites link to a site. So instead of using a prolific amount of meta tags, Google bombing is done by having a prolific amount of sites linking to another site in order to get priority of relevance. Suppose for example that I want president Bush's biography (http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html) to come up when people search for the words "miserable failure". I would do that by encouraging a few people I know to put something like this on their web pages:
miserable failure (http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html)
If several people did that on the index pages of their websites, then a Google search for "miserable failure" would then have Bush's site come up. That has been successfully done in fact, as you can see by these search results:
miserable failure (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=miserable+failure&sa=N&tab=nw)
Now use quotes and then Michael Moore tops the list:
"miserable failure" (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=%22miserable+failure%22)