minstrel
Nov 4th 2007, 8:50 am
An article published in June 2007 in the New York Times, Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03google.html?_r=1&oref=slogin), talks about the ongoing process of Google's ranking algorithms and includes an interview with Amit Singhal, who they describe as "the master of what Google calls its 'ranking algorithm' — the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user’s question".
Some excerpts:
"Tweaking and quality control involve a balancing act. 'You make a change, and it affects some queries positively and others negatively,” [...] 'You can’t only launch things that are 100 percent positive.'"
"[...] Any of Google’s 10,000 employees can use its 'Buganizer' system to report a search problem, and about 100 times a day they do."
"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."
"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."
...more (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03google.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)
Some excerpts:
"Tweaking and quality control involve a balancing act. 'You make a change, and it affects some queries positively and others negatively,” [...] 'You can’t only launch things that are 100 percent positive.'"
"[...] Any of Google’s 10,000 employees can use its 'Buganizer' system to report a search problem, and about 100 times a day they do."
"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."
"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."
...more (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03google.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)