Wired On Google’s Algorithm

Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web from Wired has an excellent and detailed look at the evolution Google’s search algorithm over the years. It is a pretty long write up, so I wanted to highlight those key points in bullet format for you all.

Key Advances:

• Backrub in September 1997
• New Algorithm in August 2001
• Local Connectivity Analysis in February 2003
• Fritz in Summer 2003
• Personalized Results in June 2005
• Bigdaddy Update in December 2005
• Universal Search in May 2007
• Real Time Search in December 2009

Personally, “Fritz” is a name I never heard before. In the SEO world, this is when the “Google Dance” died. Google, in the past, updated their index about every 30 days. Google stopped that in 2003 and began indexing and updating their index several times per day. Maybe my memory is foggy, but I do not remember the name “Fritz” coming up back then to describe this behavior. It is also true that Google was much more shy about sharing details about their search algorithm, back then.

Other key points in the article showed that Google has introduced 550 “improvements” to the search algorithm in the past year alone. Google holds weekly search quality launch meetings to discuss those improvements. Wired feels Bing is Google’s biggest threat, specifically in health, reference, shopping and travel type queries. For standard web search and relevancy, Google wins – according to Wired.

I strongly recommend you read the Wired article, Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web.