Filtering of Forbidden Words and Search Results
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It can be hard enough to get your website noticed by search engines without taking filtering into account. The fact is, companies, organizations, governments, individuals, and search engines can and do filter search results based on various criteria of what is "inappropriate." This article examines the issues, and explains how filtering is accomplished.
The algorithms (and especially their intricacies) of the search engines for compiling the search results for a particular search query have been constantly discussed on seochat.com. Probably the lack of reliable information -- from the horse's mouth -- is the fertile ground for so much speculation and guesswork regarding how search engines work, and what makes a page pop up in the first place in a search on one day, drop into the second tens on the next day, and sometimes not even show in the search results at all.
There would not be so much discussion about all of these details if search engines were not such powerful instruments, both for driving traffic to one's site and for delivering the information users need and want. Although search engines are not the main “censor” in today's society, one cannot just wave a hand and say “leave it” when such “minor” details as filtering and censorship of any kind do influence the retrieved search results.
What is Filtering?
Filtering, as the name implies, is the process of selecting which of the pages that meet the search criteria are to be displayed in the list of search results. When filtering is done in order to ensure the relevancy of the returned search results, there is nothing wrong. Basically, searching is all about relevancy -- getting only what is necessary from the uncountable pages on the Web. But when filtering is influenced by other techniques, different from relevancy, one starts to wonder if filtering is not just another word for censorship.
There are many approaches to filtering sites which are not desirable to visit. Although most filtering of content, labeled as inappropriate, occurs more often by ISPs, governments, employers, and parents, filtering of sites is done by search engines as well. Let's make one point clear: filtering by search engines can hardly be regarded as intended censorship, unless certain interests (such as in the case of Google and Yahoo with China) try to manipulate the results.
Filtering by search engines is more subtle -– i.e., there is no direct ban to visit the site or make the page inaccessible. Although there are cases when certain sites are absolutely excluded from search results, most often sites with “inappropriate” content are simply buried in the second hundred search results, which is more or less a guarantee that they will not be noticed and visited.
How does this happen? I bet nobody knows the precise algorithms that affect the ranking of a page, which contains forbidden keywords. And to make things more complicated, I seriously doubt that anybody has an idea about the words that are labeled as forbidden by search engines. And when there are no clear rules for what is acceptable and what is not, it is logical to ask whether filtering is not just a refined form of censorship.
Next: What are Forbidden Keywords? >>
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