Google updates search algorithm

Links

Read @searchengineland
Read @google blog

What's new?

Google was lately (Jan '11) accused of allowing content farms to gain high page rank. We have their answer now (for US market). This is major change affecting 12% of search results, thus we have an revolution.

This actually is very impressive as Google is one of the biggest corporations in the world. They had a major flow undermining their credibility and they were able to come up with an proper answer in ... 3 weeks? Most medium companies wouldn't even had a plan in such a short term.

Changes

Google noticed that most of today's internet is copy & paste (aka webspam). They found a way to find out where the chain starts (ie. information/signal origin) and rank it waaay higher than copies. Good, wise, simple (to explain at least :).

Impact is on those who mainly copy content and on linking-only sites (without comments and so on). In short: the less home-brewn content, the lower the points in rank.

How that affects content farms

Since content farm is just automated copying of prepared content with little changes, whole farms hopefully get taken down with this change.

This is however a war for really big $money$ and webspammers might come up with something new, like using HBGary's idea of creating and managing whole fake societies (aka Sockpuppet Management Software). That would give them randomized social content, forums full of generated posts and so on. That would be hard to catch, because social activities are very, very hard to measure with math. Also facebook makes real humans' conversation very shallow:

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• see some more @images.google.com

End of Nokia?

There have been numerous posts about Nokia going down because of partnership with Microsoft.

• Tomi Ahonen announces huge Microsoft win and Nokia loosing market share to Apple and Android.

• jacquesmattheij.com says that Microsoft now owns Nokia

I can't imagine any other reason to write such things than "being first with any blog post".

Granded, Microsoft is rightly hated by all of linux/java developers and Apple lovers. But why would such a partnership be bad for Nokia? And why it would be bad for us, customers?

Pros of this partnership

1. Microsoft has way better developer tools than anyone. No, Eclipse cannot match Visual Studio for average developer. And this market needs thousands of developers, not just stars that code Java or lisp in simple text editor (like me :P).
2. Microsoft knows how to drive developers to platform, how to document APIs, how to lay an infrastructure to making money developing for their platforms. They are very, very good a that.
3. C#/ASP.NET community is huge and so far had nowhere serious to put their skills as far as mobile development goes.
4. Nokia knows what is important in mobile devices and how to keep high quality. Microsoft does not know that.
5. Nokia is light years ahead of Microsoft in terms of design of small devices. No, xbox 360 controller is not a small device. Kinect neither. They are great, but not small nor mobile.

What we have with Micronokia is a partnership of market leader in software development with strong player and recognized brand in mobile devices. Something like beer maker partnering with dvd-rental stores to make your evening even more enjoyable.

Now, what's BAD about that?

Cons of partnership

1. Microsoft is dangerous trojan-horse, unfair player and evil incarnation in one. That's a real problem until you consider that all mayor enterprises probably are the same, just not prooven to be that evil so far. Besides, who cares?
2. Microsoft is gonna sue everyone for infringing patents. Great, but that's american law problem and american market. And google has money for lawyers. I won't pay a penny no metter who wins the trial.
3. Nokia partners with most heated ... wait..

There arguments are all either based on accusations or emotions. Take a look at Pros and use pragmatic common sense. We may all only benefit from strong, prepared players joining the market. Like maybe devices would drop prices? Or maybe someone finally does some cool mobile Xbox-aware toy?

Have faith brothers in free market...