Can We Trust Google?
Posted on October 21, 2007
Putting your Trust in the Search Engines
Most professional people know one golden rule to adhere to is “business has no emotion”. Typically when emotions are involved with business productivity decreases. I wanted to take a closer look at the word “Trust” because I believe that it is closely tied to emotions and it is a term that Google is trying to emulate through “TrustRank”.
First let’s take a look at the dictionary meaning of “trust”
1. reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.
Source
Who do you trust?
I found myself first asking a simple question…
Does trust connect to human emotions?
I actually found this question a little difficult to answer because humans build trust and lose trust with the interactions they have with each other. The more I think about it the more I have come to believe that trust is derived from emotionally based human thoughts.
It is no secret amongst savvy webmasters that Google is assigning a “trust” (TrustRank) factor to websites. Trust rank is an algorithm that focuses on a small group of seed pages to a website. Once the algorithm determines what the seed pages are a human reviewer reviews them and assigns a score to them which gets integrated into the overall ranking system (SERPS). Trust rank is an extension of the PageRank algorithm.
Here is a link to the researchers that continue to develop trust rank and the measurement of Spam mass.
What! Google Doesn’t Trust Your Site?
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. In other words if Google is applying a TrustRank value to you, it would seem fair that the webmaster community has a means to measure how much we trust Google.
Do You Trust Google?
It’s a fair question. I know my personal feelings around this but I wanted to measure this topic as objectively as possible. Here is what I have decided to do to get a better feel for how much people trust Google.
Nothing Personal Googs
Because Google has the largest market share in over all searches performed in a day they are the benchmark site for many information based surveys and search engine strategies. When it comes to heeded discussions around search engine optimization round tables my bet is Google is the most frequently used word. The fact is they are the greatest source of information and are lightening quick in producing relevant solutions to your query.
For all you Google lovers I am sorry for my next blog post. I am currently finishing up my research project on “Trust: The People vs Google“. My next blog post on this subject will show an analysis, method and report on how much “we, the people trust Google“. The difference here will be my formula for determining trust will be obtained by nothing but human based logic.
I am keeping this introduction to the project brief and simple to digest. My goal is to measure the pulse of the people. Do we trust Google? It is not to be confused with Google bashing because I thoroughly enjoy using such a powerful, well organized, bottomless pool of information. That said, we also must realize the thresholds where information provided by search engines may not be trustworthy. It is important to know when results reported by search engine may not be accurate. Here’s a simple example of how Google results may cross the line of trustworthy.
So you understand the nature of this survey please take a minute and watch this video on trusting Google.
There are many reasons why results from search engines may not be accurate:
- Effective search engine optimization influencing inaccurate content.
- Google 7 billion page Bad data Push
- Proposed and implimented algorithmic programming (Not sure if this is real or not?)
- Artificial linking
- Search Engine Penalties Issued- You may have a nicer site than top ranked competitors but if you’re penalized the good people may never see it. Google has absolutely no responsibilty in explaining any penalities in place for you. When your site is penalized you probabley will never know exactly why unless you can properly diagnose it yourself.
- Use of frames- If you have a great site in frames search engines have problems crawling frames. The prefer clean html, properly named page content in a single page. Your superior site may never be seen by the people unless you break out the credit card and buy your traffic.
This Research will Include
- Videos from YouTube speaking to “trust Google”
- Queried research from Search engines using search query “trust Google”
- A summary based on facts
- All relate sources of information
The purpose of this research is to try and determine the dividing line where information and data may not be accurate, safe or trustworthy in SERPS (search engine result Pages).
I am sure that Google is the most enriched source of information technology on the planet. As a webmaster that works hard to be the best they can be we have come to rely on certain operatives and tools that provide us with some idea on how we are progressing with our hard work on our websites.
Webmasters beware. I am sorry to report that Google does not
- Report accurate data in your beautiful green toolbar to you
- Report accurate data when using site: and link: to you
Tips to refine your Google search
Not all people know this but special characters and operators, such as +, –, ~, .., *, OR, and phrase match (quotation marks) can be used to fine tune your search. These are all operators and special characters that allow us to customized our search the way we want it.
- + - this Forces Google to include a term by preceding the term with a “+” sign.
- “–”- leads each term you do not want to appear in result pages with a “–” sign.
- “~” Produces synonyms when your search query starts with ~.
- “..”- Results contain numbers in a range by specifying two numbers
- “*”- an asterisk character or a wild card
Stand by almost done 
John
Frequently updated Trust Rank Research Page
Stuck on the net
Tags: trusting Google, trust rankings, search engine rank, search engine optimization tips, trusted sites list, people, search engine optimization tool, trusted web sites, trusted sites registry
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing |
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