Quite accidentaly I stumbled upon some search results that look very weird to me: I googled my name/nick in various forms and started browsing the result pages. As to be expected, I found samples of pages from all the social networks I am registered in, but, from the page 10 of results onwards, I started seeing familiar pages but quite unrelated to me.The familiarity came from the fact that these were pages I had shared recently in Google Reader. Yet, what I saw in the search results was not my shares items, but the original articles or posts, which are, linguistically, quite unrelated to the terms I googled. They are semantically related though!
Have a look and dare to explain:
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Here is my explanation. Google depends much on the links going to a page, to deduce what this page is about. This is how googlebombing was done, it’s not like the target page includes the word “failure” (to use a famous googlebomb example :-), but that other pages link the word failure to a specific page (G.W.Bush).
So, if you shared items appear on a public page, an the link includes the words “by Nikos Anagnostou”, Google understands that the target page is somehow related to “Nikos Anagnostou”. Depending on how you look at it those may be relevant or irrelevant results.
@vrypan Thanks for the explanation but I think it falls short in one thing: the shared items are not direct links to other sites. They are links to feeds. Which means that, if the basis of your explanation is correct, Google makes a lot of processing before publishing the results: relates feeds to pages, translates my shared items as links to pages and then aggregates the whole thing. Which leads me to think that there might be even more entity relationship processing behind the scenes, that relate me to my slice of the web, so to speak. Maybe a new algorithm is at play that takes into consideration a lot of social aspects too.
Nikos – are you using FriendFeed. Erhan also mentioned the same issue in http://friendfeed.com/e/8546c536-d02a-46f7-bdf1-efc9c9f5281a/Of-course-Google-is-following-my-sharings-in-FF/. I am seeing the same problem too when I try a vanity search for my name.
@atul Yes, I do use Friendfeed but had not seen Erhan’s mentioning. Thanks for passing the info.
I think mine would be PORN PORN PORN…so I will refrain from that search.
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