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theory on demand
Yahoo! and many other search engines and portals offer the same sort of facilities to personalize their home pages. Yet the quality and quantity of what Google has to offer has remained unchallenged to this very day. The threshold of attention on the Web is notoriously low; pages are visited and then left within a very short time-span often not more than just a few seconds. Consequently, a user who ‘invests’ several minutes in a website, reveals, through her choices, a lot about herself and her habits as a consumer. This information is then carefully memorized by the company that owns the search engine (whether that is Google!, Yahoo! or another firm) and it comes to represent a true source of wealth produced free of cost by the user himself. This type of information is essential for the sponsoring companies that offer targeted products and services. Home page personalization makes a site more attractive and intimate: the site becomes some sort of private tool in which the user goes on to invest time by choosing colors, tweaking its outlook, and selecting her favorite content. A recurrent (habitual) visitor who is able to configure his starting page participates in the construction of the web interface. Giving the user the freedom of choice and control over a few pages means transforming her from a simple target of advertisement into an ‘intelligent’ consumer, that is, a consumer you can extract ‘intelligence’ from. To foster interaction is surely the best, and yet subtlest, way of achieving ‘fidelity’. This is why we see a stark increase in the amount of participative interface environments, for which ads are increasingly personalized in order to let us all enter together the golden world of Google. 4.6 PageRank[TM], or the absolute authority within a closed world The algorithm that enables Google to assign value to the pages its ‘spider’ indexes is known as PageRank[TM]. We have already seen that PageRank[TM]’s mode of functioning is based on the ‘popularity’ of a web page, and computed on basis of the number of sites that link to it. Given an equal number of links, two different web pages will have a different PageRank[TM], according to the ‘weight’ of the linking pages: this is what constitutes the ‘qualitative’ aspect of sites. To take a concrete example: quite often, when you check the access stats of a site, you will encounter a huge number of link-ups coming from pornographic sites. This can be explained by the fact that Google assigns ranking according to accessing links which appear in public statistics. Consequently, there are programs that exploit the invasive aspect of this connection and node evaluation logic in order to push up the ranking. And pornographic sites are well known to be pioneers in these types of smart experiments (they were the first on the Web with image galleries, and with on-line payment models). While a number of software programs are looking for sites with the help of public access statistics, a very large number of links are actually established via bogus visits. These spawn from fake links on other sites that are most often pornographic. This devious mechanism literally explodes the number of visits to that site, causing its statistics to swell, and its (Google) ranking to lift up, which in last instance benefits the pornographic site issuing the fake link in the first place. It looks like a win-win situation, at least, where visibility is concerned. And it is not an ‘illegal operation’ either: nothing forbids linking up to an Internet site. This practice causes sites with public statistics to have a higher ranking than non-public stats sites.