According to Jeremy, Google is making some sort of concerted effort to de-value blogs in the determination of what matters on the web. This raises an interesting question – what matters on the web? Since the web was created ab initio to enable us to link from information to more useful information, sure, the stuff that we link to is, in fact, what matters? The fact that Google results change every day is a good thing, not a flaw. What matters changes every day also. That’s why folks watch the news every day, not just once. It will indeed be a great disappointment if he is correct in his assessment. While I don’t particularly care what algorithm they use, the concept itself – stuff that lots of people link to is stuff that matters – makes a great deal of sense.

The perceived danger is very understandable – momentary blips in interest in a particular thingy may cause search results to get skewed that direction for short periods of time, and the semi-permanence of blog archives may make that skew permanent. So then one has to figure out if there is a “correct” answer to a particular search term. That is, is Google an encyclopedia index, or a web search tool? With my loathing of folks letting Google be their research assistant (must elaborate on *that* some day), it seems to me that it should stick to what it’s good at — being a web search tool. And since linking is what the web is all about, if Google drops this aspect, they will quickly lose their top dog status to someone else who will give us what we want.