Google's Building #43

[lpstong]

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

Google's algorithm was written up in the New York Times on June 3, 2007. It wrote about how Google was/is/isn't a spectacular SE. There were some interesting things and some already known facts about Google and their SE to many of us here at Namepros.

They intereviewed Mr. Singhal, one of the Google engineers who work in Building #43. And yes Matt Cutts name was in the article as well on page #2 of the article. Where apparently much of the work for the algorithm is done at the Google compound. They discussed how they have to tweak the SE to return some results. I read 2 examples of where they had to tweak the Google algorithm because they did not return proper results.

Some complaints involve simple flaws that need to be fixed right away. Recently, a search for “French Revolution” returned too many sites about the recent French presidential election campaign — in which candidates opined on various policy revolutions — rather than the ouster of King Louis XVI. A search-engine tweak gave more weight to pages with phrases like “French Revolution” rather than pages that simply had both words.

At other times, complaints highlight more complex problems. In 2005, Bill Brougher, a Google product manager, complained that typing the phrase “teak patio Palo Alto” didn’t return a local store called the Teak Patio.
So Mr. Singhal fired up one of Google’s prized and closely guarded internal programs, called Debug, which shows how its computers evaluate each query and each Web page. He discovered that Theteakpatio.com did not show up because Google’s formulas were not giving enough importance to links from other sites about Palo Alto.

It was also a clue to a bigger problem. Finding local businesses is important to users, but Google often has to rely on only a handful of sites for clues about which businesses are best....

But Mr. Singhal often doesn’t rush to fix everything he hears about, because each change can affect the rankings of many sites. “You can’t just react on the first complaint,” he says. “You let things simmer.”

So he monitors complaints on his white board, prioritizing them if they keep coming back. For much of the second half of last year, one of the recurring items was “freshness.”...

But last year, Mr. Singhal started to worry that Google’s balance was off. When the company introduced its new stock quotation service, a search for “Google Finance” couldn’t find it. After monitoring similar problems, he assembled a team of three engineers to figure out what to do about them.

I found this important, even if I knew, it is important for those who are bloggers.

THE QDF solution revolves around determining whether a topic is “hot.” If news sites or blog posts are actively writing about a topic, the model figures that it is one for which users are more likely to want current information.

Hot topic gets your page ranked higher. And constantly keeping up on it is my understanding to get your blog better indexed. Fresh content + Relevant content = better indexing.

Interesting info on Pagerank, even if you knew this, others may not.

As Google compiles its index, it calculates a number it calls PageRank for each page it finds. This was the key invention of Google’s founders, Mr. Page and Sergey Brin. PageRank tallies how many times other sites link to a given page. Sites that are more popular, especially with sites that have high PageRanks themselves, are considered likely to be of higher quality.

Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls “signals.” PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages — like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years.

So now to find all 200 types signals. These are just some of the "signals" that come to mind.
1. Fresh Content
2. Relevant Content
3. links
4. Videos like You Tube
how many more can you name of the "signals"

It is a pretty interesting article to say the least. So Google isn't perfect. But you may read up on the entire article, it's 4 pages long in the NY Times. Article can be found here at:

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

 

[WhiteWebServices]

Thanks for posting this; very interesting.

One comment:

Hot topic gets your page ranked higher. And constantly keeping up on it is my understanding to get your blog better indexed. Fresh content + Relevant content = better indexing.

My understanding is that freshness matters more for hot topics. If the search terms you're targeting haven't been flagged by Google as "hot", then freshness isn't as important.

 

[supersexynet]

So I guess now I will have to be looking at hot trends to figure out which topic is "bad" or "good" for google, and now who is supposed to introduce new things to the web, everybody will be writing about the things that people want, but how people know what they want ?

 

[WhiteWebServices]

Hot topics are topics where there's a lot of new content being generated. That's different to saying that there's lots of traffic for it.

You could rank very well for a popular search term that isn't generating lots of new content and so hasn't been flagged by Google as hot, and do very well.

Alternatively, you could rank well for a topic that lots of people are writing about so has been identified by Google as hot, only to find that no one is reading this content and the search term is worthless.