I don’t know if I can even explain this to you. I’m not a pranking expert, but these are some of the scary pranks that make my blood boil. I’ll give you the short version first before I dive into the full details.
To begin with, Google has a reputation for being quite a bit more aggressive in its search results than the other major search engines. Google has made a number of moves, like launching PageRank, to try and get their page ranking on the top of the first page of Google. These moves have been a lot of fun to watch, but the results are becoming a little obvious to some people now.
According to Google, PageRank is a way to get a website’s page ranking in the first place. This is pretty much the same approach that the SEO firms want for their websites, and they have recently made it more apparent by introducing “PageRank badges.” These badges, called “rank badges,” are basically the same thing as Google’s PageRank.
So what’s PageRank got to do with it? Well, Google ranks sites based on how relevant they are to the search queries a visitor is looking for, and how many times a user is going to visit them. These are called “dice”, and each website has a number of them for each page on a website. The closer to a certain rank that a web-page is, the more likely that a user will click on it.
So, what’s the problem? A website is a network of pages that each have a different number of dice. If we want to know how likely a visitor is to click on a particular page, we look at the site’s rank and number of dice. If it’s low, the site is unlikely to be clicked on, and if it’s high, the chance that the user will click is high enough that the site may be worth visiting.
I like to say that a site that has a low number of dice is “scary,” and one with a high number of dice is “pretty scary.” The number of dice is the number of potential outcomes for each page on a site. A site with 10 dice is not scary, because it has 100 outcomes, but rather is highly likely to be clicked, because 10 dice is a high number of outcomes (i.e. lots of clicks).
Google does these pranks mostly to show off the different results that can be obtained by clicking a particular link. The only difference is that you are usually shown a list of the keywords that a site links to, as well as the links they actually contain. The site gets a high number of potential clicks, and then Google shows you the actual link that was clicked, and has a higher chance of being clicked. I personally like to think of these as a form of social amplification.
So what are the most interesting pranks that Google has been pulling recently? I’m pretty sure he is, but I’m curious to hear others’s take.
Some people say Google is trying to make the internet a little more fun, but the pranks that they are pulling are actually pretty serious. Some of them are hilarious, others are just a bit disturbing.
