Yahoo Updates Search Results: Film At Eleven

Search engines update their algorithms all the time - listings move up, listings move down, listings appear and disappear. For years, only a small handful of people have known or cared. But now that tens of millions of dollars in parts of the economy that get attention are impacted, algo updates are news.

Today, it's only news.com. They tell of the update and all the ensuing screaming and chearing. Of course the webmaster and seo forums are full of opinions too.

But this is going to get a lot bigger. We're going to see Algo reports the way we see Box Office Weekend Opening Receipts reported in the not too distant future. And with it, all the problems with the SERPs which the engines right now don't really have to answer to anyone on, will suddenly be of interest to Katie Curic and Chris Matthews. It won't be long before we'll be hearing exchanges like this:

(Matthews): "But why sir, do I not find 'Pep Boys' when I search for 'brake fluid', but instead find 'brake-fluid-discounts.com' a clearly inferior website?"

(GoogleFlak): "You see Chris, our algorithm takes into account hundreds of factors which impartially..."

(Matthews): "But one site is clearly better than the other - Can't I trust you guys to figure that out? Am I getting railroaded here because of payola or cheating of some kind... Your engine is driving the American Economy! Don't you have a responsibility to get it right?"

(GoogleFlak): "Sure Chris, and millions of satisified searchers come back every day because they're pleased with the quality of their results."

(Matthews): "Do those people know the games that are going on behind the scenes? The kind of manipulations we just heard about in that report from David Schuster. When I had John McCain on this show yesteray he was mentioning Congressional Hearings. Is that what it's gonna take to get accountability and for you to get this stuff right?"

I've said for a long time that Google and the other engines are having their cake and eating it too. They make their money off the appropriation of the content of others, their algo encourages millions upon millions of otherwise useless web pages to be created, they avoid real questions about optimization with the vapid advice to 'do things for the users, don't think about us', and most importantly their results are amazingly full of junk and highly ranked irrelevance. We're just past July 4th, but the fireworks are still to come.