Google Accessible Search For the Blind
Google now has an index that is for the blind. At first I thought it was just a cleaned up version of Google but after I read the FAQ I found out it is more than that.
Regular Google search helps you find a set of documents that is most relevant to your tasks. Accessible Search goes one step further by helping you find the most accessible pages in that result set.
After doing some searching on it I found that it is a very different index. It matches a normal Google search in the since that there are some of the same sites on the first page of results but they are in a different order. Sites that are mostly text seem to rise higher. Very text heavy sites like wikipedia seem to rank higher. The algo seems to integrate accessibility into its algo for this service. I thought maybe it was more like a filter but it seems to be a lot more than that.
One thing I did see that confused me at first was a lot of flash sites ranking high for some terms. When I did a view source on these sites I noticed one had a noframes tag with lots of good text. I went to another one and it did not. It did have a good title and description. It looks like this algo still uses good titles and anchor text to help a site rank. This seems to show me Google will penalize you for adding things to your site that are not accessible but will not penalize you for having nothing.
Oh yeah and a word to Google Visually Challenged is offensive to blind people. We are blind not challanged.
Hi David,
I had no idea you were leagally blind, I have been reading you posts over at WMW for years. I usually think about screenreaders when I am doing SEO as it helps me describe the page and remember what I am actually doing (apart from passing off hidden links as accessability
) I really believe seo and accessability go hand in hand.
This latest Google search has me very interested. I do a fair amount of consulting and seo work in the travel area and it’s usually spammed like no tomorrow. Anyway long story short, my dad has a great content site that mostly gets lost in the algo these days and it ranks where it should in this accessable search which I thought was interesting. The results for most of the local travel listings in my area are the best I have ever seen.
I am sure we will see some of the ‘quality’ factors from this algo come across into the regular Google Algo. That would be really nice! I think the head of the project is really onto something other are missing in the algo.
Cheers,
Ben