More on The March 31 05 Google Patent
Why does Google reward an accelerating rate of document changes?
The answer to this — and every other Google patent question, for that matter — is that accelerating document changes indicate that the document has a higher likelihood of being high quality and authoritative.
Google is biased against stale documents, presumably because a new information would generally tend to supercede old information.
Given two sets of documents, decide which is of higher quality and more authoritative.
First we have hundreds of years of scribe-transcribed papyrus declaring the flatness of the universe. We have a huge quantity of reference to the flat earth and some priests vested with intellectual authority writing them.
Next we have a couple of pages that maintain that the world is round. At first these documents have little weight and little authority. As the earth’s roundness gets confirmed, more and more explorers write of the round earth. Their documents point to one another (“…as Columbus has already said, the earth is, indeed round, and I can confirm that…”).
The new documents increase with an accelerated pace as more and more explorers confirm each others’ findings. Meanwhile, the flat earth documents get staler and staler.
New paradigms with contagiously righteous information will generate a pile-on effect, creating lots of content quickly. By the time the round earth notion reaches critical mass, the flat earth web master quits and that site’s documents stop getting updated all together.
Hence, an accelerating rate of document changes implies a new source of authoritative, peer-reference content.
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