I can't put my finger exactly on it, but I swear that in some cases Wikipedia's status on Google has dropped fairly recently. It seems like in some cases that the relevant WP hit for a page is several spots... lower? I can't put my finger totally on this or triangulate it exactly, but it feels off compared to how it has been for a very long time. Has anyone else noticed this?

Any articles in particular?

It was about eight or nine months ago, I think, but I recall Daniel Brandt making a similar statement.

With my experience watching pages from my website go from #3 to #12 to disappear to #2 on Google for certain search terms, I've pretty much given up trying to noodle out what Google actually does to render us those results.

Greg

Nah, thats the weird thing about it. It doesn't seem totally consistent and it seems to vary a bit. Michigan was a recent one, I think. I know the searches vary by cluster or DC or whatever, and the round-robin routing they do for search engines. But I swear that WP was #2 or #1 here recently. Right now it's fourth, and earlier today it was 5th or 6th. A year ago it would have been #1/#2 with a bullet non-stop.



Same. I used to think I had a relative handle on it, but aside from how it relates to my own sites (usually) I can't tell at all anymore.

LOL. That's because GOOGLE is faced with one of the most difficult problems on Earth: how to discern "consensus" opinion about importance, from a bunch of anonymous sources which have no verificational trustability scores at all, and which all exist in what are effect multiple (really huge) SOCK/MEAT incarnations. All with no oversight at all on the opinion-duplication which is NOT the result of independent judgement by independent minds.

In effect, GOOGLE does robotically what Wikipedia does by means of good old-fashioned witchhuntery detection of ballotbox-stuffing. Amazing that it works at all, isn't it? It's not how WELL it works.

Wow, it's now 5th; 6th if you include the google map (srsly). Something else I found strange was that International Yahoo! put it 5th, Yahoo!7 (Australia) put it 4th, and this plugin thingy I use that works through Yahoo! UK put it first.

That said, who'd want to go to Michigan?

Oh, and since I'm sharing images of my desktop, I'll point out here and now that Firefox 3 sucks. Discuss.

Works well on Mac, seems to have big issues on some Windows. Not sure that there is anything special I have noticed, though I also have put in AdBlock Plus which works like a dream.

Bleh, maybe it's Windows that's the real devil. I just don't get excited about software where you can tell they've put more work into developing their crash reporter than the actual program that shouldn't be crashing. Hence, frequent crashes. And yeah, that's getting off topic.

Oh its just Google preparing the ground for Knol:)

Cheers
Doc

Well, maybe Wikipedia has dropped in rank, but, if it has, the reason will relate to the algorithm Google uses to determine webpage rank on its search engine.