The section that stood out for me in the Historical Data patent application from Google was this one:
QUOTE
[0074] Links may be weighted in other ways. For example, links may be weighted based on how much the documents containing the links are trusted (e.g., government documents can be given high trust*). Links may also, or alternatively, be weighted based on how authoritative the documents containing the links are (e.g., authoritative documents may be determined in a manner similar to that described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999). Links may also, or alternatively, be weighted based on the freshness of the documents containing the links using some other features to establish freshness (e.g., a document that is updated frequently (e.g., the Yahoo home page) suddenly drops a link to a document).
* My Emphasis
Of course, that's a "may" and we don't know how much of this patent application may actually be part of what Google is doing. Does Google consider all links from .gov or .mil or .edu to be worthy of high trust?
There's been a lot of talk about a paper on
Trustrank across the net. Interesting document. Don't know if it has inspired any changes to the search engines. From that document:
QUOTE
The relatively small size of the good seed set S+ is due to the extremely rigorous selection criteria that we adopted: not only did we make sure that the sites were not spam, but we also applied a second filter—we only selected sites with a clearly identifiable authority (such as a governmental or educational institution or company) that controlled the contents of the site. The extra filter was added to guarantee the longevity of the good seed set, since the presence of physical authorities decreases the chance that the sites would degrade in the short run.
The authors of that paper are more closely tied to Yahoo! than Google, and it really isn't an indication that any of the search engines rely upon which tld is being used.
While we have Matt Cutts recommending to people at a Consumer Webwatch symposium on "
Building Trust on the Web" that if they use site commands to limit searches to .edu and .gov sites that they would receive more trustworthy information, that still doesn't help us here:
QUOTE
MC: Definitely. The quick answer is, you can always do site.edu or site.gov in your key words and that will restrict your search only to that domain, only educational institutions or to government sites. That's a very good way to find information.
I haven't seen documents from the search engines that support an implicit trust, and accompanying higher ranking based upon links from a specific tld, with the exception of that historical data patent application. It doesn't mean that they don't skew results positively based upon a link from a page on one of those sites.
But the absence of any evidence doesn't negate the possibility either. We would be engaging in a fallacy if we made that assumption. The answer is possibly out there somewhere, maybe under the realm of being a trade secret.
This topic is locked
