Google, the world’s most popular search engine is in fact known best for their search techniques and algorithms. In their article, “An explanation of our search results” Google clearly writes,

A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.

One of the many factors that Google uses is PageRank. By the PageRank algorithm Google ranks individual pages of a website. Also, how good a page is ranked by Google depends greatly on how well a page is linked with other websites. For instance, a link to a particular website A mentioned on another website B, which is already high-ranking, results in website A to become high-ranking too.

But pages from newer websites with no links in other places on the internet start with a PageRank of 0/10. So, a post by a higher-ranking popular or moderately popular website is often listed higher compared to a post from a new website. This is only logical since a popular or moderately popular website is certainly more reputed than a website which is new. However, the moderately popular websites sometimes take advantage of the situation by copying content from one of these emerging sites and publishing the same in their own, which results in their site-link to be listed above the new website in which the post was originally published.

Unfortunately, one of our own articles, “Use/show large images on Facebook chat” (and perhaps more, who knows?) was found published in another website today. Initially, Google results for the query “Show large images on Facebook chat” did list our site-link on top of the other website but gradually their site-link made it to the top for the same query.

We made a report in the Google forum regarding this. Minutes later, a contributor from the support team replied to us with the words,

This could only happen because Google deems your site to be of very low importance and almost no value. A good site won’t suffer from scrapers.

Such type of comments from contributors (those who are not associated with Google officially) often impart false impression that Google offers little or no scope for newcomers to popularise themselves enough, and some eager webmasters might even lose their interest,  because other more popular websites can easily copy content from the new less popular sites and attract more visitors. Also Google’s search algorithms would place their content ranked higher than the new sites only because their website is more popular.

We are not against Google, and we do understand the complexity involved in improving search algorithms. But after all its Google, and we as Google users, do expect more from them. It would certainly be a wonderful job if the Google Team could look into this serious issue and provide  search better results in future.