There has been some debate over the advertising Practices of search engines. Basically some search engines take money from companies to place that companies name higher in a search. For instance Radio Shack could pay MSN.com to put its name higher in the results for searches like “buy computer.” As you can tell many web users would decry this practice as unfair. Instead of finding what your looking for instead many searchers fear they will only find “sponsored” links.
If the knowledge that your search engine websites are taking money and skewing your results is startling how do you feel about the idea that webpages are designing themselves to trick web crawlers into placing them higher. The only difference here is that instead of giving money to search engines they are paying outside consultants.
But then there are the times when we need search engines to filter our results. As a new parent I would be very upset if my child was searching for school work and found nasty things. I am pleased that major search engines like www.Yahoo.com and www.Google.com offer safe search. This changes the results of searches too.
Lastly there are searches that inadvertently bring up negative or hate group websites. Google had a problem previously where the word “JEW” when search brought up an antisemitic website as the number one result. Needless to say the website http://www.jewwatch.com/ was glad to get all that attention when their views went up from 2 to 4. But this was possibly a time in which the website needed to skew the results again. Google did issue an apology http://www.google.com/explanation.html and currently Wikipedia results are number 1 and 2. (WHo would have thought!)
My is there ever times that Search Engine results need to be adjusted?
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