The New York Times' technology blog has a post covering significant recent changes being released that redirect the traffic flow of the internet on the approach from the biggest and most ubiquitous internet search engine. After first changing its parameters a few months back so as to not so easily fall for website spam--pages that capitalize and snare hits with words popular searches but are hollow and without content, in addition to continual fine-tuning, parameters and rules in favour of freshness, timeliness, I suppose over other criteria like brute popularity or possibly definitiveness.
These structural changes, of course, which in turn molds and models the internet itself, being a repository also but immediately the sum of what seekers find and share, refer to something called an internet search algorithm. Knowing that an algorithm is not a formula or a mathematical proof but rather describes a set of rules, like a dogma (no one can hold all of the important tenants of belief or affiliation in his or her head all at once and at all times)--a rule of thumb that for all practical intents and purposes becomes something absolute and infallible (ex cathedra and within itself) given how many processes the computer-aided human mind can summon, brute and making the finite applicable for as far as one cares to extend infinity to. A lot of things taken as a rule are calculated with such heavy-handedness, and apparently one reason that the mainstream search engine are making the change is pressure from social networking platforms that have made freshness, instant and incessant updating customary. If search results are arbitrated truth, one wonders what tweaking is improvement and what is pandering over precision and bias.
