Today, Google posted (finally) the first in what was promised (two months ago) to be a regular series of posts intended to open up more about aspects of internal operations. The original post was laden with disclaimers to the effect that certain truths could not be revealed due to the nature of their business. Since then, I've been waiting (not alone, I'm sure) to see just how much Google would be willing to share.
This first entry is presented by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow in charge of ranking, and is described as "sharing the philosophies behind google search." A nice place to start, I suppose, but certainly we shouldn't expect much meat. Amit neatly summerizes this philosophy as follows:
Amit goes on to explain each in more detail, but you can get the gist in just those three points and not much more is revealed. That said, Rule #3 raises some questions. In the post, Amit says:
"In our view, the web is built by people. ... 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. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity."
My view on this is somewhat different and I believe this is the crux of where current search technology has its issues. I've discussed this before, but I don't believe you can answer a subjective question by objective means. The best any outsider knows about the current relevancy algorithms is that it weights heavily the qualities of on-page text, meta data, and inbound links. While humans are creating these items, there simply isn't enough subjective information directly related to the search term to accurately use a quantitative measurement system. That is, there is nothing here that measures how many searchers found a given page relevant for a given search term.
Perhaps we'll gain more insight in Amit's follow up post where we're promised details on the technologies behind the ranking systems. I just hope we don't have to wait another two months.
I'm a bit late on this one. A wonderful family vacation took me away for about 10 days, but I'm back now and, for once, I agree with Lisa Barone.
Lisa's post covering the SMX Advanced : Give It Up Session appropriately took aim at the panel of "experts" who dished out deceptive tactics in the name of SEO. Comic relief is provided by Marty Weintraub who condones taking advantage of link-exchange partners who don't understand NOFOLLOW, and then tries to cover his tracks by saying he's "negotiating the multi-value of a link exchange" in the post comments. Oh, he then blames it on Google by saying they made the rules, not him. I'll point out the obvious here and say that just because somebody else makes the rules doesn't give you license to break them. Let's also remember that the original "rule" (i.e. intent) for NOFOLLOW was to combat blog comment / forum spam, not to decieve link-partners.
Lisa called Marty a jerk but hid it behind a strike-through. I won't. Marty seems like a bit of a jerk to me, too.
Doug Heil swoops in (sorry, Doug, couldn't resist given the mask and cape comments) and attempts to defend the good name of SEO. I, for one, appreciate Doug's straight shooting when it comes to dealing these expert panels.
Anyway, nice work Lisa.
Today, Google announced Google Ad Planner, taking a direct shot at services offered by comScore and Nielsen. Differing from Google Trends for Websites, Ad Planner is aimed at media buyers looking to identify target sites for ad placements. In a market where Nielsen and comScore charge hefty sums to advertisers for access to their data while at the same time being loathed by publishers for the inaccuracies of their panel based measurement systems, Ad Planner is likely to gain acceptance fairly quickly.
There is also a level of integration with DoubleClick's MediaVisor product. The possibilities for integration between the DoubleClick and Ad Planner are endless and will give Ad Planner a distinct advantage over competing services. The service is currently in closed Beta right now but I'm hoping to get my hands on a login so I can test it out.
How do you think this announcement will impact the market space?
So, as I'm sure you're aware, late last week Google announced the release of Google Trends for Websites.If you haven't checked it out yet, or read one of the many reviews, it basically offers (approximate) site traffic volumes, top keywords, and related URLs for sites Google has a sufficient amount of data for.
Google joining the ranks of potentially (or known) inaccurate sources for traffic data (comScore, Alexa, I'm looking at you..) asides, a few folks got seriously up in arms over this release. SEOBook.com screamed "The Death of Privacy," and Lisa Barone (doing her best high school sophomore imitation) said "Not Cool, Google."
Why do people forget the contract we have with Google. We allow them to index and store our site content and use their free analytics tool without any pre-conditions on how they may use they data collected in the process. To be clear, I believe that Google wields way too much power over the Internet economy. But that doesn't matter.
If you don't want Google to have your data then stop using Google Analytics, uninstall the Google tool bar (which everybody loves to complain about), and block the GoogleBot using Robots.txt. If you want to continue to use their free services and benefit from the SEO-bubble we're all living in, then please shut up.