This in-depth piece on Salon has a section about how Google may have tweaked its search algorithm. (The article may be part of Salon Premium and thus require a paid subscription.)
The Google backlash: The king of search rules the Web — but now some of the natives are growing restless.
“In recent months, many pundits have complained that Google’s results were getting clogged with blogs. In March, Andrew Orlowski, a writer for the Register, an online tech daily, pointed out a phenomenon he called “Googlewashing” — a practice in which bloggers, working together, can essentially redefine some important cultural or political concept in Google. The idea was not exactly new. Since Google relies heavily on “link analysis,” and since bloggers are the Web’s most indefatigable linkers, the search engine has always given them great weight — and bloggers found out last year that if a whole lot of them started linking to the same thing at more or less the same time, they could affect Google’s results…. On June 15, Google began updating its servers to a new index called Esmerelda… What happened? Did Google decide that it did not, after all, want to demote blogs? Had the company determined that the heat from bloggers — who, remember, are also now one of the company’s key constituents — was too great?”
