Google’s Matt Cutts just posted a video on YouTube answering the question, “how many search algorithm changes were made in 2009?” In response to that question, Matt said Google likely makes a change per day to the search algorithm. They don’t necessarily release those changes each day, but they will release them in batches. But overall, he hopes to average at least one change per day to the algorithm. He said in 2009, they probably had between 350 to 400 or so changed to the search algorithm.
A few months ago we covered a Wired story on Google’s algorithm where Udi Manber, Google’s head of search said Google has introduced 550 “improvements” to the search algorithm in the past year alone. So I guess Matt was being conservative with his math?
Here is the video:
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Nice post… and it is a good thing Google is changing rankingfactors daily. However… sometimes it seems it has no real effect at all and spam is growing like weed in it’s engine. I thus think they will not be able to create the perfect engine.
http://twitter.com/warrenleona
In ‘Computer Mediated Transactions’ (March 6, 2010), Google’s chief economist Hal Varian said:
“In 2008, Google ran 6,000 experiments involving web search which re-
sulted in 450-500 changes in the system. Some of these were experiments with
the user interface, some were basic changes to the algorithm. The ads team at Google ran a similar number of experiments, tweaking everything from the background color of the ads, to the spacing between the ads and search results, to the underlying ranking algorithm.”
Similar numbers were quoted by Amit Singhal.