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July 10, 2008
Google Shares Three Ranking Philosophies
The Google Search Quality Team is keeping its promise to explain more about how they conduct their work. As usual and expected, it's fantastically vague, but since a chunk of our readers at any given time are new to search, it's worth going over.
Writing on the Official Google blog, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow on the Core Ranking Team, defines Google ranking:
"Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google's search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more."
Then he gave three philosophies that the Core Ranking Team follows:
1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.
Singhal says that the team strives for simplicity in their architecture, something that Twitter has been struggling with lately. Obviously, with all the queries conducted and the massive amount of content to be indexed, it coud be easy to piece together a very complex architecture (similar to Google's woes with their ad products). With approximately 10 ranking updates per week, Singhal says the team takes simplicity in architecture into consideration in every single update.
Singhal also emphasized philosophy #3 - that Google does not hand edit results.
"You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us."
What do you think of Singhal's explanation of Google Ranking? Let us know in the comments.
Posted by Nathania Johnson at July 10, 2008 10:26 AM
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Comments
Nothing like making it seem simple. Of course they want this... but given the morass of sites, the fact that in many cases the real good informative sites do not know or use the best SEO - it is a little ridiculous to think this works.
Posted by: AussieWebmaster at July 10, 2008 12:31 PM
Sometimes I wish there was a button to push saying these results were not effective for me; give it another go. or, "nope the sites you responded with fooled your algorithms" - yes they are giving me (for example) reviews of the software I'm looking for, but the info is of questionable value, which I don't know until after I clicked the link - indicating thaty it was probably a good link. Somehow the Good review sites (CNet etc. - which I momentarily had fprgotten the name of - and so did not add it into the search) were getting pushed further down the results by these sites that "looked good," but didn't even list the big players in that field (my guess is that these sites were well-keyworded, thinly-veiled, affiliate sites - ranking their affiliates higher.
thanks for listening.
Posted by: Cat Lark at July 12, 2008 2:14 AM
