Wisdom and the Google
One of the main reasons for this company's success is that it has realised
that its most important resource is the collective intelligence of
everyone who uses the web.
When the web first became popular amongst the masses, the main way to get
a site noticed would be to use meta tags. These are keywords that
describe the type of data that the site contains. These words would be
contained in the HTML code (the language used to construct we pages) at
the top in the "head" area of the page. Such data would be invisible to the reader of the
page. Robots sometimes known as spiders or crawlers would scan the pages
and they would then be rated by particular search engines. Here is an
example of a page header:
<TITLE>Fishing World</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="The British fisherman's premier fishing
magazine">
<META name="keywords" content="fish, fishing, rods, bait, rivers, permits,
boats, lakes, lochs, trout, salmon, cod, carp, perch, pike">
</HEAD>
This method is now dated although search engines can still use
this at least in some small part to rank sites. Google uses a PageRank
algorithm to do this. Obviously this is complex, but essentially how it
works is it looks at what other websites (pages) a web producer is linking
his / her website to. Each link to one of these pages is counted as a
vote. The more links the more votes and hence the better the website
ranking. Hence the crowd is deciding - many people around the world are
making websites and hence creating links to other pages. Each individual
person is making the decision as to which pages to link to. The Google
crawler is aggregating these results. A classic case of
Wisdom of the
crowds in action."
Click here to explore further
terms and conditions:© copyright Allan Wilson 2011 all rights reserved
