A glimpse into the heart of Google

Johannes Beus
Even though they are usually not well known for correct or interesting articles about searchengines, the New York Times is now offering an interesting glimpse into the Google department that is in charge of changing the algorithm. The head of the “ranking-algorithm”-department, Amit Singhal, has made some interesting comments.

Every week, the algorithm is changed about 5 times. Most of these procedures are small ones, but – as many of you should know – from time to time there are also larger changes.

Every one of the roughly 10.000 Google-employees has access to the “buganizer”-system where they can report errors in the searchresults. This happens about a hundred times a day and is then evaluated by Singhal, who is Mighty Cutts (office)-co-worker by the way, and treated if there are enough similar complaints.

There is the problem that some searchqueries need current results, while a general, more frequent updating of the index is not viable - partly due to quality deliberations. This problem was solved by adding a QDF flag – which stands for “query deserves freshness” – to every query. Now, probably through news sites, blogs and other sources, they are continually deciding which queries are concerned. I can imagine that the “Hot Trends”, which enriched the Google Trends
At the moment they are taking over 200 factors, which they call “signals”, into consideration for the ranking – the PageRank is only one of them. Signals are extracted from the websites themselves but also from their past. It is interesting that Singhal is pointing out that Google is recording and evaluation the link history for a website.
Johannes Beus - on Mon (06/04/2007) at 10:46 AM

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