Google changes its search formula

Under pressure to improve the quality of its search results from smaller rivals, Google has changed its formula for recommending websites in a bid to penalise those pushing “low-quality” content.

Google announced the switch late on Thursday, and in an interview on Friday one of the leaders of the company’s campaign said that 11.8 per cent of the queries it received would show changes in the “top few” results on the first page.

“Quality of sites is a very hard thing to define,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, told the Financial Times. “We had a breakthrough about a few months back.”

He dated the effort to late 2009, when a revamp of Google’s index brought “fresher” results that also favoured shallow content.

Mr Singhal said that extremely popular search terms might not be noticeably affected but that topical matters and more obscure subjects would both see changes.

Google rolled out the changes in the US and would soon expand it to the rest of the world, he said.

The leading search engine said on its official blog that it was trying to reduce the rankings in “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”.

The company did not detail how it was making the calculations, and website owners reported various impacts. Google said it wanted to boost “sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on”.

Industry experts said the move was aimed squarely at “content farms”, or those whose business model depends on producing vast volumes of cheap material in order to draw viewers in from search engines and then advertise to that audience.

The best-known company meeting that description is Demand Media, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in January. Demand’s formula for generating content matches common search-engine queries that are likely to interest advertisers with freelancers paid by the piece.

But Demand said “at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact” on its content business.

Shares in Demand rose during the day on Friday as analysts compared Google results in the US and other countries and saw no big drop-off in rankings for Demand properties including eHow, a large network of advice pages filled by freelancers.

Demand is far from the only company dependent on Google’s choices.

Others investing heavily in content designed to appeal to search engine results include AOL, which expended its effort this month by paying $315m for the Huffington Post news and opinion site.