The Evolution of TrustRank
* NOTE: this story has been updated in the post …
The Truth about TrustRank
Only a few months ago, waves of discussion swept though the search community when it was reported that Google had trademarked the term “TrustRank”. Many speculated on the significance of the term and on what it may mean to tried and true search marketing techniques. But in truth, it’s just a new term for a very old marketing technique, “Word of Mouth”
Trusting in Friends
Before the search engines or even the http protocol, people used word of mouth to find that great BBS or UseNet group. But people did not just listen to anyone; usually they would only visit places recommended by friends and neighbors or other people they “trusted”. In the days of 3200 baud modems, you did not waste time on unknowns if you could help it. This was probably the true beginnings of TrustRank online.
As the Internet started to grow, specifically with the advent of http and web pages, it became almost impossible to only rely on friends to give you advice on where to go. You had to start placing your trust in someone else. The parallel between methods of creating trust online and the growth of the search engines is no coincidence. As people yearn for new content online, the search engines vie to be the focal point of discovery and the only way to do that is to first earn the trust of the surfers.
Trusting in Editors
The formalization of TrustRank first started as human edited directories. Since the task of reviewing and suggesting websites was a bit much for one person to handle alone, directories started popping up which would review sites and list the ones which it deemed worthy. Yahoo! started as a human edited directory and quickly became one of the most trusted sources for new websites. At one point, getting the Yahoo! “Cool” icon next to your URL was the equivalent of getting a #1 Google ranking for your primary keyword or phrase today. This worked because of the trust people put in Yahoo’s Editors and the sites they selected for the directory.
Other directories started showing up and even finding more unique ways to use editors to build a directory. The DMOZ or “Open Directory Project” used a large number of volunteer editors and assigned each editor to a specific category. This provided specialists in categories and the ability to fine tune site selection. The volunteer editor core was not without its problems, but the concept was clear. Dedicated editors would provide listings that could be trusted even more due to the content specialization of the assigned editor.
Trusting in Engineers
The exponential growth of the web made the job of categorizing it quite impossible for a single editor or even a group of editors. Computer engineers and programmers devised a way to retrieve content from the web and categorize it automatically, hence the birth of the now infamous search engine spider. This process could perform the work of thousands of human editors and a fraction of the cost.
The trust test of these new processes was the accuracy of their results. A combination of two processes, the collection of the pages by the spiders and the analysis of the page content by the search algorithms had to perform together to produce results that people trusted. WebCrawler became the first search engine, relying on automated results and not human editors. More portals and directories began to utilize this new process and soon Lycos and Altavista were trusted household names (houses with an Internet connection that is). Even Yahoo had added a search engine alongside its famous directory. Search engines have now earned the surfers trust as a legitimate tool for finding content online.
Trusting in Webmasters
About this time, we also see the unfortunate birth of search engine spam. Fairly quickly some webmasters realized it was easy to manipulate the results of these automated systems to their favor. As the abuse grew, something needed to be done to restore the trust in the search engine results people were seeing. A small emerging search engine seemed to have the answer. The founders of Google realized early on that they could rely on the “votes” of other sites in the form of links to help them identify the best sites. The more sites linking to a page, the more the page could be trusted.
By relying on the assumption that webmasters would only link to good sites on a topic, the ideas of “link popularity” and “Page Rank” were born. As you can guess, the ideas worked. Google soon became the most trusted search engine and others followed suit. Yahoo, MSN and others now incorporate some form of in-bound link analysis into their ranking algorithms. This “voting” process continues to evolve as those same abusive webmasters tried to find new ways to manipulate the search results. The effect of this fight against search spam only strengthens the ability of the search engines to identify quality sites.
What does this mean in terms of TrustRank? It means the major search engines have moved from a solely technological approach back towards one which incorporates the behavior of a specific group people to add trust to their search results.
Trusting in People
We are currently in the middle of the next phase of TrustRank evolution, one that takes us back to the beginning in a way. The influx of social media over the past couple of years is starting to affect the Internet as a whole and how people interact with it. The higher levels of interactivity and customization allowed on web sites today provide the means for individuals to build collections of their own favorite sites or pages and share them with friends and strangers. All of a sudden, you have hundreds of thousands of “Editors” categorizing and ranking the millions of sites and pages on the Internet. Once again, you can trust your friends and neighbors to let you know which sites are the ones they recommend.
The search engines are not oblivious to this change in trust behavior and are making moves to capitalize on it. Yahoo purchased the webs largest social bookmarking site del.icio.us as well as the popular photo sharing site Flick’r. If they are not currently doing so, I would bet the data from those sites will eventually find its way into their search algorithm. Google and MSN will probably make similar acquisitions in the near future. Digg.com is rather ripe for the picking I’d say.
It is interesting to note, that as the web grows, so does the number of people needed to provide trust to a specific site or page. It took just a couple of people back when the web was very young. Now, with billions of pages of content available to the average surfer, you need the help of 10’s of thousands to keep that trust alive. Over time, TrustRank has evolved to form what I like to call “The Circle of TrustRank” …
- First trust came from specific individuals
- Then groups of individuals
- Then Automated processes
- Back to groups of individuals
- Finally back to specific individuals
TrustRank seems to be traveling in a full circle from listening to your close friends and neighbors, through a variety of incarnations, then back to friends and neighbors. Not just yours this time, everyones.
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