i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

As we have seen in class, the frequency of a term is not enough to infer the quality of the document that contains it. Recently, we have had the case of a  Brooklyn eyewear merchant who goaded customers into posting scathing online reviews, with a better position on Google searches. For that reason, Google has modified the search for that query to 'punish' that particular result. Is this good or bad? Google is worried about this, and as a company's spokesman says: "I don't believe that Google uses sentiment analysis, I see potential pitfalls if it were to start. If you have a lot of people who hate Obama, for instance, and you decided to rank on love or hate, you might not be able to find the White House and that would be terrible"

Read the whole story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all