Robert_Charlton - 2:10 am on Feb 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

A short interview on Public Radio today with David Segal of the New York Times, who wrote the story. Fairly basic, but to the point. It includes a few details not mentioned (as I remember) in the article, like the number of pages linking to JC Penney's "dresses" page....

How JCPenney possibly rigged Google's search algorithm [marketplace.publicradio.org]
Marketplace
American Public Media
February 14, 2011

Also includes MP3 of the interview, and answers a question I'd raised earlier, which is how the story came to the NYT....

From the interview transcript...

Ryssdal: Not that this was any of my business, but were you just randomly searching for dresses and bed linens on Google one day and noticed that everything was coming up JCPenney? Segal: No, a reader noticed. A reader who is in the retail business, although not in a field that is a competitor to JCPenney. He actually makes signs, of all things, and just had taken an interest in the world of search engine optimization and had noticed there were three to four of these anomalous results....