Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google oddities

6th July 2003

Dave Winer:

For several months this Google search would turn up a UserLand page as the number one hit. Today it’s not in the first ten pages. Must be a bug. Or do they play games with their search engine? Straight question. It’s really hard to believe it just fell off the Web in the last few days. And while I’m at it, I don’t like it that they label my older specs as deprecated (in caps no less). [...]

It is pretty strange that the RSS 2.0 specification isn’t listed on the first page. There’s an interesting thread on WebMasterWorld at the moment about recent strange behaviour in Google’s ranking algorithms, with a number of guesses as to the cause. As to the second complaint, google’s descriptions of pagse are generall pulled from the Open Directory. Sure enough, take a look at this page listing RSS specifications, currently maintained by Ben Hammersley currently seeking a new editor (see this comment).