Freshness Problems? The QDF Algorithm

The usual way to reach the top of Google’s search engine results is create a site with plentiful, unique content, good links and age. From the search engine’s perspective, there is a dichotomy in displaying results.  New content is likely to contain more spam and could be irrelevant. Older pages are more likely to come from a trustworthy source but in certain circumstances are irrelevent because they are out of date. How do you choose what to show?

Query Deserved Freshness (QDF)

QDF is an algorithm that analyses the popularity of a search query. It  first came to light when Amit Singhal discussed it in a New York Times article on the Google search algorithm. QDF analyses the query against factors such as:

• coverage of a query in blogs posts
• the number of mentions in news
• search volume

It is not these factors directly but rather their rate of change with time that indicates interest in the topic. When there is an upsurge in these factors it can trigger the QDF to weight sites that have new content about these topic more strongly overriding the usual mechanisms.

Large companies can exploit this by leaking information about new products to well known bloggers or news sites so they become hot news. Recently, we have seen a flurry of excitement over Apple’s possible foray into the netbook market. Looking at the Google trends for the term ‘Apple netbook’ we can see the dramatic increase in the search volume in March 2009 as rumours circulate the web.

Can you exploit QDF? Possibly, if you are a large corporation with a new product to launch. For most small sites there is little hope of obtaining a scoop first but you may be able to chase the wave of popularity if you are quick enough.