Henk van Ess Drops Google Bomb

Henk van Ess and I have corresponded occasionally; he's a sharp guy who keeps a close eye on Google.

It looks like he's found something in the Googleplex that's going to generate a lot of interest. The first post of his new blog, Searchbistro, discusses it. You can see the post at Searchbistro .

Basically what Henk seems to have found is a part of Google that allows humans to tweak search results to ostensibly get rid of spam and let the most contextually-relevant search results rise to the top. From his blog: "I call it Google's Secret Evaluation Lab, but the real title is less adventurous; 'Rater Hub Google'. The coming days I will reveal all I know about this lab - must find the time first to do so."

Since he got Slashdotted, I'm sure a few zillion people will be happy to come over to his house and make sure that he has time. But I'll keep an eye on his blog.

While I always figured that there was some kind of editorial mechanism that could be applied to the search results, I figured it was more on/off -- turning off spamming sites, kicking out pages that don't follow the rules, etc. If this site is for real, it's going to start a lot of controversy. And of course it gives anyone -- anyone! -- who feels their site is not ranked fairly, unranked, dropping in rank -- ammunition to claim Google did it on purpose (even if Google took no deliberate action to change the ranking.)

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