handyfloss

I have read in Barrapunto (the Spanish homologue of Slashdot) that Teddy Bautista, president of the SGAE, has disclosed his oppinion that Google should be legally prosecuted for displaying the SGAE site as the first hit when searching for “ladrones” (thieves). Go ahead and try it (in any search engine, not just Google).

Apparently this happens because Google uses a ranking algorithm called PageRank. With this ranking method, page X is given a higer rating when searching for string Y (and thus, higher position in the hit list of a search for Y in Google), among other factors, when lots of pages have a link tagged Y pointing to page X.

Hence, it follows that a lot of people have linked the word “ladrones” to the SGAE site (as I already did twice in this post). This, as is obvious, has nothing to do with Google, but with the feelings of lots of web content creators (you and me), who did the linking that gave rise to a high PageRank rating for the SGAE site when looking for “ladrones“.

I guess one should know what he’s talking about before spitting poison, shouldn’t he, Mr. Bautista?