Comments on: The BBC Uncovers Image Search Algorithm

By: amarjee01

amarjee01 — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:53:27 +0000

Some great links there, thanks – “making the stats fit the argument” is an extremely common practice, not just by the media but by professionals as well. It’s a little scary to think about how biased we all our towards accepting information that supports our presumptions, and refusing information that does not (belief-confirmation bias). We are all much more biased than we realize.

[user name edited, as visitor came from a Y! Site Explorer result for a competitor. I'm not helping with your SEO, sorry ]

By: Kim

Kim — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:05:36 +0000

Well, think of it this way: The people who believe this nonsense will spend more time searching for their own business. This will affect their personalized rankings, which they are likely completely ignorant of, so they’ll think it’s actually working.

Ultimately this will buy the rest of us some time to do some real SEO work and out-rank our competitors.

The downside is that it will make our job of explaining how SEO really works to clients, because they always want to take shortcuts.

By: joelchrist

joelchrist — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:54:58 +0000

It will not permanent. At any time methodology may change.

By: Toby

Toby — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:58:18 +0000

Solid pot and definitely a nice find. Amazingly this is a misconception I come across with a lot of my friends and who are interested in rankings. Personally I think may people trust the internet to much without doing so old fashioned research and validation.

By: jamesq

jamesq — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:17:27 +0000

Have to agree with Luke. I’d missed the whole Michelle Obama image story but surprised at the lack of controls to ensure information broadcast is correct.

By: Luke Jones

Luke Jones — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:38:50 +0000

That is hilarious and somewhat worrying. How can we be sure that the majority of the BBC’s stories have any integrity whatsoever?! I was watching a part on BBC News 24 about internet security and SSL certificates. The ‘expert’ was stating falsehoods and giving inaccurate information to the public. I emailed in to give them the correct information – not even a response or a peep from it on the show.

Ridiculous.

By: randfish

randfish — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:30:05 +0000

Nice catch Jane I’d also add that Google themselves has said that CTR is a very noisy, easily game-able signal (just think of what you could do with Mechanical Turk and a couple hundred dollars) and thus doesn’t positively influence rankings (at least, not directly). I find that logic pretty compelling, and I think it’s sad that media doesn’t have more responsibility or accountability for accuracy on these types of issues.

By: Jane

Jane — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:22:40 +0000

@Malcolm Interesting, thanks for the link. I agree that images included in the regular SERPs with Universal search (i.e. when you see thumbnails in the Web rankings) are likely more susceptible to being influenced by click through data. I was slightly leery of saying this at all, given the fact that image search has never made as much sense to us as regular search, but yep–still a lot of discrepancies in the report :\

By: malcolm coles

malcolm coles — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:09:30 +0000

Maybe they listened to Radio 5? Matt Brittin, Managing Director, Google UK was on the Jeremy Vine show a couple of months back and said the number of visitors influenced the results. Apparently (there was a brief Twitter stir at the time). And when they show images blended into the web results, they probably measure clickthroughs on those, no? None of which is to take away from your main point, which I agree with!

By: Tilbud lån

Tilbud lån — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:04:48 +0000

The algorithm is always changing and maybe there will be different ranking factors tomorrow.