Google is Lousy for Reviews

I was looking for reviews of web development software today and found Google's results dissapointing. The top links were all reviews from 2002-2004, thus referencing software that was far out of date. As is typical, I voiced disappointment out loud and my friend Javier overheard. He reasoned that Google gives more weight to pages that are older. Perhaps generally a good idea, but not certainly when you are looking for product reviews

Comments

[Jon]

NYTimes ran a story today on just this - Google's freshness rating that helps it decide when to weigh newer content over older content.

Article is called "Inside The Black Box". Interestingly, search for that title on Google and the NYTimes.com result does not come up first.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03google.html?ei=5123&en=3feb3068329e344b&ex=1181448000&partner=BREITBART&pagewanted=print

[Ari]

Funny, I just read that article this morning!

From my experience it is true that Google gives more weight to older pages - the Google search algo. patent for example reveals that Google does take such factors as how long ago a domain name was registered when returning search results.

That being said, I have personally seen 3 to 4 month old sites jump to Page 1 "Above the Fold" listings, just because they have better on-site SEO / Link building efforts than the others competing for its terms. Brothersoft - http://www.brothersoft.com/ - is one "company" which has dominated Google's search results for quite a while due to their aggressive SEO, even though their content is mid-quality at best.