BuzzCut

FUDBust: You may think that Google's acquisition of Kaltix will bring Amazon.com-like personalization to an already effective search engine. That's not likely. Before Kaltix can deliver Penguin OSs instead of Penguin amphibians, it will need to fix Google's now-aging indexing algorithm, PageRank. That's right, folks. Google is broken.

In its year-long effort to move from a monthly reindex of more than 3 billion documents to a more gentle, rolling update, Google has been less than reliable and accurate, inadvertently dropping sites from its index and ignoring new content in favor of old dusty documents. And its problems don't stop at performance. As evidenced by the discovery of blog-built Google Bombs this year, the PageRank algorithm as it was conceived cannot make sense of links.

If it's true that the Kaltix algorithm will yield a 1,000-fold speed increase over the existing PageRank method, we can only hope Google first puts it to work correctly indexing the Web, leaving "New for You" and "Listmania" features for later.

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