In a guest assignment for Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger, Alister Cameron writes an incredible post detailing how Google Blogsearch ranks your blog posts. Using the Google Blogsearch patent application, Alister reveals some incredible information about the data Google uses to determine the quality of a blog or blog post.
He mentions how it looks like Big Brother, and it really does. It appears as though Google is taking data from not only their search results, but from blogrolls, from the qualit of a site lnking to you, from feed subscriptions on the Google Feed Reader, from chats on GTalk, from emails on Gmail, etc. They then use their fancy algorithms to determine weight and ranking. I’m not sure about you, but it looks to me like we have to worry less about the government spying on us then we do Google. Orwell was somewhat correct, but in the real future, it is big business, not governments that are truly to be feared (thanks Charles).
That said, there is much to learn from examining the article on Problogger, as the insight it provides is invaluable. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to bookmark the site, as it is one of the top blogs out there about the “sport” of blogging.
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[...] knew as much about everyone as Google did, we’d all be up in arms! I already discussed how they use private data to get better results from Google Blogsearch in the past, and this is just another step towards a complete invasion of all of our privacy. [...]