Google Sausage Making Revealed

My mother (rest her soul) would proudly recount the tale that my father’s family invited her out to their farm for sausage making one day, when my parents were dating, thinking that it would make this “city girl” run back home with her tail between her legs. In a nutshell, sausage making is as foul as the old saying implies.

So when a link came across my Twitter feed today for an infographic that goes through all the various machinations that Google goes through to not not just index web pages and provide search results, but also to populate said results with ads, I immediately thought of sausage making.

Called “Learn How Google Works: In Gory Detail,” all I could do was agree. There is gore aplenty, among the brilliant touches. Search results are polluted…uh…enhanced by increasing the ranking of pages you’ve looked at before (what? you don’t want old information? who the heck are you?) Local web sites get precedence over distant ones. Results from shopping sites are often integrated automatically (Searching for recall notices? Sorry, we’d prefer you buy). Have you visited the page before? Well, guess what, it’s gets promoted above others (be careful what you click). Where your ad appears on the page — or whether it appears at all — will depend on whether your ads generates enough income or whether you are a featured partner.

So, yeah. Go look. I dare you. I bet you never think about sausage quite the same way.