Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 25 May 2008 11:28
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Google’s notorious secrecy over its ever evolving search algorithms are
legendary for keeping competitors in the dark over Google’s success,
and for keeping webmasters guessing on how to get the best ranking. Now
the kimono is being opened just a little so we can all have a peek –
while Google acknowledges much is still kept strictly secret. What can
we see?
Udi Manber, the VP Engineering of Google’s Search Quality division, has posted in Google’s
corporate blog some details of why Google’s algorithm is kept secret and how it has been steadily improving.
Billed as an “Introduction to Google Search Quality”, Manber explains that his “search quality” team is “responsible for the ranking of Google search results”.
Naturally, they have a very important job, keeping us all coming back to Google as our search engine of choice, and Manber explains that his team’s job “is clear”.
That job? “A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them -- and in what order.”
As you’d expect from Google, they haven’t been satisfied to stop where they are, but have been making all kinds of improvements. It’s good to see a company that puts their money where their mouth is, rather than just mouthing off, as so many people and companies just love to do. Google, after all, is a doer, not a talker.
Interestingly, Manber openly acknowledges that secrecy has been paramount at Google. One can, after all, talk too much, but Google can’t be accused of that.
Manber says that: “for something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design. We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do.”
And why? Manber says there are two reasons for it: competition and abuse.
Manber explains that keeping competitors in the dark is an obvious strategy – secret recipes and all that. But abuse is obvious too – to stop people from “gaming the system”. Manber also acknowledges that “security by obscurity” isn’t the real plan here, however, Google certainly doesn’t rely on that exclusively, but it has helped to “prevent a lot of abuse”.
Manber says that Google’s ranking algorithm details are the equivalent of “Google's crown jewels” and they are “very proud of them and very protective of them. By some estimate, more than one thousand programmer/scientist years have gone directly into their development, and the rate of innovation has not slowed down.”
But now, Google feels compelled to finally share more details with us all – users, competitors and obviously even those nasty abusers. What does Manber share next? Please read on to page 2.
