No, it’s not because the evil empire is paying me enough to shift my priorities. It’s the same reason that I agreed to be a part of MSN’s Search Champs program when they invited me last year—having Google as the gatekeeper to all online information is something that scares the crap out of me.
I don’t think Google is evil. But I know that they’re capable of making mistakes. And when they’re thought of by much of the world as the authoritative online source, their mistakes take on more magnitude than they might in a more balanced and competitive context.
I’ve had a great reminder of this over the past week, as I’ve struggled to find out from Google why the pagerank for my blog URL (mamamusings.net) has suddenly dropped to zero. For over a year it’s been solidly at 6 every time I’ve checked (which wasn’t often, since the Google toolbar didn’t work on my mac, so I had to go to an external site to check it). But last week I installed the Google toolbar for Firefox, and loaded up my blog. I was shocked to see that it didn’t register at all.
I checked a couple of things before I contacted Google. First, I checked an external pagerank monitoring site to confirm the result. Then I searched for my first name in Google…as before, mamamusings.net came up as the third result in the set, which seems to indicate that the site still retains some importance in the index—that didn’t seem to match the zero pagerank number. Then I did a link: search on mamamusings.net on Google, and found that the number of results had dropped dramatically. Note the following:
link: mamamusings.net (Google) : 897
link:mamamusings.net (MSN): 25,811
link: mamamusings.net (Yahoo): 103,000
Huh?
So I emailed Google’s customer support, explaining the details of the situation, particularly the precipitous drop combined with the continuing high results for a first name search. I received a response from the “Google Team” (no names, of course) with a very simplistic response:
Hi Liz,Thank you for your note. Please be assured that your site is not currently penalized by Google.
A page may be assigned a rank of zero if Google crawls very few sites that link to it. Additionally, pages recently added to the Google index may also show a PageRank score of zero because they haven’t been crawled by Googlebot yet and haven’t been ranked. A page’s PageRank score may increase naturally with subsequent crawls, so this shouldn’t be a cause for concern. To learn more about PageRank, please see http://www.google.com/technology/
Regards,
The Google Team
Well, that was helpful. (Not.)
So I replied to “The Google Team,” explaining that I was fully aware of how pagerank worked, and that I continued to feel that the precipitous drop indicated a “cause for concern.”
I got another reply from “The Google Team,” this time telling me that they’d discovered a mirror site (mamamusings.com) that had a higher pagerank (I automatically mirror the .net site on .com because so many people tend to assume the .com domain, but the number of actual links to that page is quite low), and that if I was to redirect from the .com to the .net with a 301 message that the problem would probably be resolved.
Well, maybe that would increase pagerank a bit. But it still doesn’t explain why my site went from a rank of 6 to one of 0.
In response to my providing them with the same URLs referenced above, they said only that:
Also, we’d like to reiterate that our link search does not return a comprehensive set of results. We recommend selecting the “Find web pages that contain the term” link for a more comprehensive list of the links that point to your page.
Lastly, please note that we can’t comment on other search engines’ results.
So at the end of the day, they (a) won’t explain why or how my pagerank could have dropped so quickly and completely, and (b) won’t explain why so many links to my site have apparently disappeared from their index.
It’s a damn good thing that I’m not running a commercial site where pagerank is more of an issue. As it is, for me this is just an annoyance. But for many others, it would be far more problematic.
What this underscores to me is how dangerous Google’s current dominance in search engine mindshare is, particularly when combined with their lack of incentive to be accountable to siteowners. Monopolies of any kind make me nervous. Monopolies on information make me particuarly nervous. I’m very glad that Yahoo and MSN are making credible efforts to make search a more competitive space, and I’m also quite glad to be involved with Microsoft’s efforts to do so.
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