Google’s top search engineers predicted when the company revamped its search rankings last week to favor more authoritative content, there would be significant winners and there would be losers. As the dust settles in the wake of that change, the prediction is proving true.
Among the apparent winners: Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, the Library of Congress, the Encyclopedia Britannica, several newspaper and other media Web sites, AOL and even domestic doyenne Martha Stewart. But while some “content farm” Web sites criticized for shallow content primarily authored to manipulate search results took a significant hit in Google’s rankings, some critics say the changes are either not being applied fairly, or haven’t gone far enough to promote high-quality content.
Across the Web, the stakes in Google’s change to its algorithm — a major rewrite that visibly affected the results of 12 percent of all U.S. search queries — are huge. A site that can’t attract enough traffic from the dominant search engine has a lower chance of survival. And Google acknowledged that it acted because the company has something at stake: people will search less if they can’t find quality content.
Given those stakes, critics like Vivek Wadhwa, a University of California-Berkeley researcher who has blasted Google’s tolerance of “content farms” in recent weeks, said Tuesday that Google’s changes didn’t go far enough. Wadhwa said he was irked that Google’s search revamp, according to a report by one analytics company, may have promoted the visibility of one site criticized as being a content farm — Demand Media’s eHow.com.
By collecting ad revenue from Google advertising on Demand Media sites, Google “is funding this pollution” of the Web, Wadhwa said.
Demand Media declined comment, referring questions to a company blog post that said its Google rankings were not materially affected. Others on the negative end of…