mediajunk

Danny Sullivan, on his excellent site Search Engine Watch, provides an analysis of the co-adaptive relationship between blogs and search engines.

But his essay misses out on a key insight, one which was teased out by Andrew Orlowski last week in The Register, concerning the power of a small number of A-list bloggers to influence search results for particular phrases. Orlowski has coined this ability to hijack the search results of certain phrases "googlewashing".

In a somewhat muddled article, Orlowski nevertheless chooses a good example -- "second superpower". The first thirty or so Google results for this phrase lead directly or indirectly to a newly created blog by James Moore. How did Moore manage to generate such a high Google ranking with a new blog? He didn't; the A-list bloggers (such as his colleague, Lawrence Lessig) did, because they all linked to him.

I do not suggest (though Orlowski seems to) that A-list bloggers conspire to "googlewash" certain phrases, but I think the phenomenon of search engine results being influenced by a handful of "elite" bloggers is of interest to those (like me) who (sadly) devote time to imagining how the web will evolve.