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After a decade of public representations that Google’s vaunted search algorithm is “neutral’ and unbiased, we now learn from Google’s own Mr Singhal that it has substantial regular human intervention to discriminate what site gets what ranking .

Richard Waters in an article at FT.com (Subscription only):  Groups magnify chances of Google hits

Companies with a high page rank are in a strong position to move into new markets. By “pointing” to this new information from their existing sites they can pass on some of their existing search engine aura, guaranteeing them more prominence.

This helps companies such as AOL and Yahoo as they move into the low-cost content business, says Mr Bonnie. “They can use their Google page rank to make sure their content floats to the top,” he says.

Google’s Mr Singhal calls this the problem of “brand recognition”: where companies whose standing is based on their success in one area use this to “venture out into another class of information which they may not be as rich at”. Google uses human raters to assess the quality of individual sites in order to counter this effect, he adds.

This first-ever disclosure by Google exposes a rats nest of conflicts of interest that Google has in its “black box” business model. This is important because Google now is:

• The world’s de facto editorial filter by which Internet content gets found;
• The only revenue collector for most of the world’s websites; and
• The dominant gatekeeper for any business seeking to reach Internet users and websites; …and finally because…
• Google is publicly representing itself as neutral and unbiased in order to maintain the trust of users, advertisers, publishers, and Governments around the world.

Source:

- PrecursorBlog
- FT.com

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