Has “trust” become too strong as a rating-factor?

Johannes Beus
A subject, about which I already wrote something last year, is that, by now, the strength of a domain with Google is having such a large influence on the results that it is getting increasingly harder for small sites to endure besides large ones. Since I recently got the feeling that this demeanor is increasing instead of decreasing, I dug through our database and got the following numbers. For 100.000 varied, German keywords the number of “unique” domains for every position from 1 to 90 was set against the number of the entire results. What came out is an indicator for the variety of domains for the respective positions.


It is nice that we can see that the variety, meaning the number of different domains is noticeably less in the front than further back in the results. Another interesting fact is that while the first three pages (position 1-31) still show some irritations which are caused by current news or similar universal-search gimmicks, for example, after that, there is a very steady increase.

Does Google put too much weight into the trust of a domain? On the one hand I can understand that Google seems to have decided to offer the user a safe, mediocre result rather than take the risk of recommending a site in the SERPs that could be better, but does not have to be. On the other hand I would like to see Google entertain the thought that more variety in the results might be a good idea – after all, the “same old story” of Wikipedia, Ebay and Amazon should eventually start getting on the users nerves.
Johannes Beus - on Sat (02/02/2008) at 12:55 PM

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