posted on Oct, 16 2016 @ 12:27 AM
a reply to:
reldra
I've gotten picky about search engines because many of them toss ads as the first result... and often times these are ads/responses based on someone
coding "whatever the person is interested in, we have it"...when they don't. I was googling something like malocclusions once and got pages
purporting to offer me "the best in malocclusions."
Nowadays they teach how to verify information in search engines in many university courses. What I saw in the Google algorithm was that an article
had to contain links to original sources (so you could get away with a link to a newspaper article but not to a blog) - and that the site would be
ranked rather than the individual article.
It'll be a work in progress, I expect. What we saw with the search engines was that while they were initially neutral, hackers and businesses (and
con men (and women)) started gaming the engines for their own ends. Programmers tweaked the algorithms and the same bunch learned to game that as
well.
If you look at it mathematically, it's a rather interesting game of predator and prey. The information hackers want to "get" the prey (eyeballs and
purchases and credit card numbers) and the prey doesn't want to be sold to or to be led into scams. What the "prey" wants is fresh information that's
useful and correct -- and manipulators would try all sorts of "landing pages" and other tricks to get your eyeballs to their space. (I was part of a
scamwatch group at one time that took some of these schemers off the internet... we helped (many did) take down Sanford Wallace. I learned a lot of
interesting things while watching them.)