With the New Year comes a new algorithm from Google. Google’s new algorithm is two fold. 1. Artificially promoting recent web pages, 2. picking up on a querie spikes and activity regarding topics.

Google is artificially inflating the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical data and the few backlinks that are detected. Resulting in top ranking of Digg posts over informative articles related to the search terms such as Wikipedia who would have normally had the top or near to the top position.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing. It only seems to affect results when a date is indicated in the query, not something most users would do. But this change will throw Search Engine Optimizers for a loop. If Digg articles without the usual optimization and indexing time are now showing up quickly and in the top of search listings this will throw off the rankings for the well established relevant sites. Meanwhile Bloggers have already begun taking advantage of new implementation, using attention-grabbing titles along with the presence of feeds and trackers to give them a leg-up in this real-time effort for search results.

Google’s other change in its search algorithm, which picks up on a spike in queries in order to conjecture that some activity is going on regarding the topic. This tweak appears to be a more passive way in which to gauge the popularity of a particular query in order to intentionally rearrange some posts in order to provide newer news, a change in the algorithm that will undoubtedly upset Search Engine Optimizers in the same way that the initial Page Rank system did a decade ago.

Do you think these changes worth it to get you the newest news in a faster manner? Do users really use search to find newest news or would they just go to Google News to do that? Google will undoubtedly continue to tweak the system to prevent spam blogs, we’ll see how this plays out.. But perhaps a separate system (or tab) would work better for the overall user base of Google search?