Google Is Not Planning To Exclude Blogs

There was a report and some blogger follow-up including one from our gutted cohort about Google planning to index blogs separately, and possibly remove them as "noise" from their main search results. Turns out that this isn't true, as reported by Dave Winer.

This whole thing struck me as impossible anyhow. There's no way to reliably determine what is a blog and what isn't. If Google's page rank function is being fooled by the incestuous linking amongst blogs, well... that just means that they need to fix their function. Surely it can be done. Detecting cycles in building rankings of strong graph components is pretty elementary graph theory stuff. Admittedly with billions of nodes and edges in the directed graph the computation isn't going to be pretty, but CPUs and RAM have gotten a lot cheaper since Google got started ;-) Seriously, I think that a few tweaks to the page rank function, such as establishing lowering the contributed value of links that appear very soon after the linked-to page itself first appears should adequately deal with the blog noise problem.