It’s that time again.
No, not the release of the new Harry Potter movie, this was a debate on something even more mysterious and magical!
The big “G” has been forced to defend the way it ranks search results, as questions arose in relation to its practice of manually intervening to override its automated ranking system. In short, the European Commission is looking into complaints from a small quantity of companies that Google’s search rankings and its interrelated advertising system may treat some competitors unfairly.
Consequently, it has been reported that Google executives have described the impersonal nature of its ranking systems in order to dampen down any criticism that results can be manipulated to favour or disadvantage certain sites. The suggestion here seems to be that the company’s algorithms (er…) produce better quality and more pertinent results than one that might be based mostly on human intervention.
Do Google now and again override the system, in particular in relation to the automated process that determines the weighting given to search adverts in its Adwords system?
Well apparently, it has been reported that Google do acknowledge that it does occasionally (albeit rarely) manually alters rankings in its search engine to counter distortions that might arise from its algorithms.
How would we mere mortals ever know!
