WebProNews

Brief overview touches on challenges of search

Competitive concerns and abusive webmasters prevent Google from delving deeper into the secrets behind its search.

Webmasters wish to know more about how Google works at ranking sites, mainly to rank better themselves. The relevance of Google's search rankings helped catapult the site past the competition when it launched, into a leadership position in search it still maintains today.

Google has never been especially forthcoming about its inner workings. Despite the long-standing mission statement of taking all the world's information and making it useful, Google keeps itself exempt from such scrutiny.

Udi Manber, a VP of engineering at Google in charge of Search Quality, posted a few superficial details about that topic at the official Google blog. "Being completely secretive isn’t ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past," he said.

He discussed the difficulty of search ranking as compounded by the many languages in the world. "There are really no standards for how to convey information, so we need to be able to understand all web pages, written by anyone, for any reason," said Manber.

Those with a passing interest in search may appreciate knowing how PageRank, the famed algorithm Google's co-founders developed, fits in with numerous other factors when calculating a search results page:

Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

Matt Cutts took the opportunity presented by Manber's post to help clarify (he hopes) to his legions of followers how he impacts the search quality efforts at Google.

This post makes it crystal clear that I have a limited role in overall search quality at Google," he said, noting his role heading the webspam team falls within search quality, rather than dictating how it works.