Google’s Algorithm Explained, Sort Of

As the search marketplace is becoming more competitive and refined, the big players like Google are starting to lower the shroud of secrecy that surrounds their most valuable commodity — their algorithm.

The other day, Amit Singhal, an Information Retrieval (IR) researcher and Google Fellow opened up and began explaining some of their search ranking techniques. While none of this is going to blow the doors of the Search Marketing world, the intended transparency is nice.

After stating that Google intends to “delve deeper into the technology behind [their search service] in a later post”, this one dealt mainly with Google’s philosophy.

The three main ideas in that search philosophy are as follows:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

But, I can hear you asking, if there is no manual intervention by Google, how are site’s getting banned, penalized, punk’d, sandboxed, and otherwise pushed into the search oblivion? Google, through Amit, provides the answer for that one by stating that the subjective human element that goes into the search-o-sphere is done through the creation and linking of pages. The intervention comes from algorithmic refinements that counteract imperfect search results.

As this is really just a delicious taste from Google’s secret recipe, any search geek certainly welcomes the scraps from algorithmic table.

From the post, we can see more of Google’s desire for quality in listings, and the importance of the content, linking and user-directed results in order to rank well. As search advances, it’s getting harder and harder to “game” the system, so long-term results are best based on the guidelines and philosophies of the most important rule-maker.

As usual, to check this out in full, head over to the Official Google Blog.