Johannes Beus
To me, the searchenginegiant Google sometimes seems like the proverbial Elephant that is afraid of the small mouse. Especially if we take a look at the generic SERPs, consisting of a city-name and a job-title for example, most of the time we will be shown yellow pages, opinion portals and similar sites instead of relevant websites from local providers. How does this happen? Google is aiming to provide the searcher with preferably good, meaning relevant results. To evaluate the quality and relevance of a site, which consequently decides the position thereof, Google has relied to an increasing degree on “trust”, which is an assessment if they rather trust the content of a complete domain, in the last few years. Sites have to work for this trust though: good incoming links, a certain time being online already and no actions on the domain that are too much beyond the webaverage. Naturally it is easier for large projects with corresponding financial and technical backings to work for this trust – be it natural or “recreated” – than the self-portrayal of a regional craftsmen. This behavior of Google becomes a real problem if we consider the thoughts that Cho and Roy came up with in their paper “
Impact of Search Engines on Page Popularity”: popular sites (concerning both the visits as well as the number and quality of incoming links) will become more popular while unpopular sites will lose even more ground. This way a large number of high-quality websites are deprived of the appropriate number of visitors. For searchengines this means that it is necessary for a change in or a noticeable improvement of the algorithms that are in use so far; for siteoperators it means they should try to live with the conditions at hand and repaint their mouse as well as get some letters of recommendation from the animal kingdom.
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