The symbiotic relationship between Google and the weblogging community is interesting.

Google of course is the default search engine for most people on the net. 'I googled it' crops up in online communications increasingly frequently. In the weblogging community all tidbits about Google gets devoured with avid attention. There was Dan Gillmore's over the top comment about how Google would make domain names reduntant and plasticbag's rejoinder to it. Both made it to daypop and Blogdex. The recent Googlewhacking phenomenon is another example. The pros and cons of the Google Programming Contest got analyzed both in slashdot and Metafilter.

Now it seems that Google reciprocates the compliment. Mathew Haughey (of Metafilter) decided to take on Critical path when they made an unsolicited telemarketing call on his phone no that they have looked up from the 'WhoIs' database clearly marked as personal. He posted a critical note about it on his site. He also urged everyone to link to his post. Matt has a large following. The MEME worked like magic. Within a matter of days his 'Critical IP sucks' page outranked the 'Critical path' corporation on Google Searches. The ethical aspects of this were discussed on a MetaTalk thread recently.

What makes me curious is what yardsticks google really uses to determine site ranking? What makes the weblogs exert so much influence in google search results? (Not that I am unhappy about it). Two things that we already know:

Pageranking: Simply put, every page has one vote. "Its PageRank is essentially a measure of its vote; it can split that vote between one link or two links or many more, but its overall voting power will always be the same". So when these thousands of weblogs start pointing to a single link, that link's rank on a google search result start shooting up.

Frequency of updation: Google apparently loves frequently updated sites and there are references to it on the net. I don't really know how it works. But obviously Weblogs get updated a lot more often than most other types of sites (except probably media sites).

I have been scouring the net hunting for whitepapers, case studies on Google. So far, I have found 'The Anatomy of a Search Engine', (probably the most often accessed research paper on the Stanford University site) and this pdf document that explains pageranking concepts in a layman's language. Haven't found anything else worth noting yet.