

Google's Panda Update: An Interview with Matt Cutts & Amit Singhal - illdave
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/

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tokenadult
"We’re lucky to have the criticism, because that means people care enough to
tell us what they want."

That's a winning attitude in a competitive business. Because the Google team
mentioned search results for medical terms in the interview, I tried out a few
searches on medical terms that a few months put appallingly bad sites at or
near the top of the results page. Now Google is serving up much better sites
on medical topics, so I'm glad that algorithm change was made.

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topcat31
There are lots of very interesting things in this post - one of the most
interesting long term changes I see is that Google are now admitting that you
can lobby for algorithm changes.

I can imagine in another 12 months there will be vocal lobby groups to get
Google to change parts of their algorithm for certain types of sites. This
feels like the start of Google coming out of their shell and admitting that
they listen to communities like HN and will respond with large scale algorithm
updates.

I'd also dearly dearly love to know what this breakthrough was:

"Amit Singhal: Well, we named it internally after an engineer, and his name is
Panda. So internally we called a big Panda. He was one of the key guys. He
basically came up with the breakthrough a few months back that made it
possible."

~~~
willvarfar
Indeed. My mind races:

something like assigning super-distinctive words prime numbers and multiplying
them in a paragraph, and doing a lookup on it to see if that combination of
super-distinctive words appears elsewhere.

Would be fun to find out how very wrong I am...

~~~
nl
That algorithm would find duplicate content, which Google has done a decent
job detecting for a while.

The new update was about low-quality content. Thinking of an algorithmic way
to detect that isn't easy (obviously!). I guess I'd be looking at adapting
things like
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_test)
somehow, so it wouldn't penalize either easy-to-read or difficult-to-read but
would look at the density of harder-to-read content vs easier-to-read fluff.
Or something!

~~~
benologist
I'm not sure it would be that hard for Google to identify the crap sites -
when you go to one you either click your back button or out through the
adsense that usually dominates/perfectly blends with the content anyway,
Google is catching that bounce rate damn near 100% of the time.

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illdave
It's also interesting how they admit that the results can be gamed if you know
what the changes they've made are. While that's most likely always been the
case with Google's algorithm (any search algorithm, really), it's interesting
that they're publicly saying it.

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webjoe
How long do you think it'll take for people to figure out how to game this
change? If content farms are dead, what's next? Social Spam?

