Monthly archives: May 2005
Entries found: 2
Google Patent: an accelerating rate of document changes
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.
Google Patent Implications: updated outbound link anchor tag text
Why does Google want to see updated outbound link anchor tag text?
At first glance this patent rule seems somewhat contradictory to Google’s mission of delivering high-quality content.
In their never-ending quest for quality content, Google implements an anchor tag algorithm that categorizes updated content as good and stale content as bad.
At first this seems wrong, as so eloquently pointed out by riottech (Google recent patent historical data and page rankings).
It will be interesting to see how Google handles stale documents. It seems like a page not having recently updated content will not always mean that it is not a good source of information. Many encyclopedia articles and reference pages should not change often, I would think. Does fresh content always mean better content?
I suppose that Google’s reasoning is like this: “In 1491 the world was flat. In 1492, not so much.”
In other words, what are the chances that an updated document is less accurate than an older one? Let’s assume that document updates imply higher document accuracy.
Updated inbound link anchor text indicates a probable document correction.