With the full text of Google’s general guidelines leaked on remote quality raters (April 2007 version — PDF) , one can really envision the immense problems that Google is having with its algorithm. A company that proclaimed itself as being able to algorithmically determine what should rank well across the web has been slowly backtracking towards either a manual approach or a double-checking approach towards Google’s search results.

News of the document is spreading like wildfire with ideas on how to use it to every SEO advantage. You can even begin to see further manual reviews happening as well affecting a multitude of websites.

Nonetheless, what the main players are not noting is how blatantly this points out the failure of Google’s algorithm and the future of spam results showing up more prominently.

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Google announced a few days ago its vision to essentially mash together a Wikipedia like site with a Squidoo layout essentially desiring to have a competitive online encyclopedia that has ads. Beyond the horrible name, this product may come to haunt Google in the long-run becoming a turning point its perceived status as an honest company into a monopolistic corporation similarly to Microsoft.

Google Knol essentially could take down the major content providers such as Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages, Yahoo Answers, etc. as it will naturally be ‘algorithmically’ favored by the grand ‘artificial intelligence’ of Google—just as Youtube currently is for videos. Competition for ad revenue will drive a lot of people to copy millions of text from across the web creating duplicate content issues that Google still cannot detect through its ‘artificial intelligence’ particularly with RSS feeds, in turn creating complaints of infringements on copywriting.

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Google has been trying to reduce the use of buying and selling links (for PageRank) since the last PR update by manually de-indexing some link broker websites along with dropping PageRank for some sites selling links. Quite a few sites selling those links became very worried and either stopped selling their links or placed the ‘nofollow’ tag on their paid links (which had to be some kind of violation to the link broker sites’ agreement with them).The PR update, which solidified Google’s strong stand against paid links (including the explicit addition to being against Google’s Guidelines), was both manual and cosmetic—at this point in time. Sites that were ranking for a variety of their keywords still continue to rank well and those that did not probably suffered a loss due to some of their paid links being nofollowed.

A few questions that come to mind all around the whole Paid Link spectacle:

• Did Google go into the link brokers’ sites illegally to get who was doing the paid link information or are they now able to truly detect paid links?
• Did Google get most of its information from webmasters submitting paid link reports and if so, can the link brokers sue the webmasters for breach of contract?
• Are paid links now officially black hat SEO? And just what is black hat SEO?
• Does Google need to be regulated by the FCC?
• What’s the difference between buying links and link bait?
• How strong is Google’s search results and are there any long-term flaws?

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Who is Demerzel?

• Essentially a cover name by R. Daneel Olivaw.

Then who is R. Daneel Olivaw?

• R. Daneel Olivaw (R standing for “robot”) is a character from Isaac Asimov’s book series: Robots and Empire as well as Foundations and Empire.

Why a focus on Demerzel?

• I grew up on reading some of Asimov books and was greatly influenced (in my opinion) by the character of Daneel Olivaw. I chose Demerzel because essentially the robot, following the Three Laws of Robotics and the Zeroth Law, plays parts behind the scenes to help push humanity in the right direction so that it will not destroy itself. Daneel Olivaw goes as far as helping produce a person who only makes right choices in his life in order for Daneel to promote his idea that humanity can only survive if it becomes a part of Gaia. In the end, however, the person Daneel chooses instead says that he will take humanity’s chance with a new Federation based on freedom and commerce which Daneel has to accept even though the chances of humanity’s survival drops by a few percentage points.

Where can I learn more information?

• Wikipedia always has good information from time to time and can be read over here.

More to come…

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One of the things that always has bothered me about playing against bots or AIs for gaming is not that game designers give the advantages to AIs as a way to “make” the game harder–I understand its tough to make an AI “smart” (although that does bother me a little)–but rather that the AI effectively “cheats.”

Bots/AIs basically know where you are whenever you play a game or know how weak/strong your army is and always finds the weak point without scouting it out.

Let’s go back to basic StarCraft:

You have four bots and yourself (with the bottom of the map clear), though technically only 3 bots as SC almost always had one bot that sat around and resource-camped for the other ones. Now, while you’re sending out scouts to find out where they are and building up your defense (or offense), the other 3 bots gear up on zerglings and just straight out take the orange path of least resistance to your base. No scouting, no guessing, no fog of darkness to hide in.

Why is it so difficult for game designers to essentially separate the game AI from the bot AI such that the bots have the same disadvantage you do? Essentially strip away its ability to see/know everything about your resources and let it at least “feel” a little more human rather than add in stupid messages from random bots saying “you suck, r0xlol”, “my dog could play better than you”, etc.

Even in FPS games such as Unreal, DoD, CS, you still get a very ‘bot’-ish feel as they have a good idea where you hide. Ever try to play as a sniper and take out “smart” bots all day? Ever make it past the first few shots? Didn’t think so.

I guess I could go ask my friend Sumir at Mediocre Minds who works at EA, but somehow I think he’ll just complain about gamers wanting more than what is possible… or bring out Oog to mock me.

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