Google, Yahoo and Bing’s unique page ranking strategies
This article describes how Google, Yahoo and Bing differ in their treatment of backlinks and other factors to determine the ranking of hubs and authority pages on the internet.
In class, we learned that PageRank is determined by in-links (the article calls them backlinks) and can be determined by analyzing hubs and authorities. Google mainly considers stronger authorities as ones with a larger number of backlinks (to hubs). In contrast, Bing considers stronger authorities as ones with fewer backlinks – but of higher quality and reputation. As a result, Bing’s search results may have fewer pages that have in-links from common sources like YouTube, Amazon etc that will populate any page’s backlinks. This also acts as a countermeasure to unethical practices, like page owners buying backlinks and stuffing their pages with keywords.
It was discussed in class that the hub-authority relationship is cyclical – hubs determine how reputable authorities are and vice versa. This article also describes other parameters that determine the ranking of hubs and authorities. One way that’s relevant today is through Social Signals – pages that receive a large amount of social media engagement are ranked higher and considered more reputable. Furthermore, authority can be determined by domain type – .edu and .gov are preferred over others. This allows algorithms them to rank results more quickly and comb through fewer pages. Bing in particular goes a step further to prioritize domain age (the older the better), which is something Google and Yahoo do not consider as much.
I found this article particularly relevant to the class since it talks about other factors that influence the strength of certain nodes in the network. I was also curious about the computational power required to comb through billions of pages to rank them, and this article describes ways in which those algorithms are made smarter and not solely reliant on backlinks.