Insight Into Google’s Search Quality Efforts

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine from the New York Times has some deep insight into the workings of Google’s search quality team.

Google Blogoscoped has an excellent summary of some of the highlights from the article. In short, Amit Singhal, the head of the search quality team, let the New York Times in, to learn a bit about how Google works.

What we learned from this article is that the search quality team’s job is never done. They often have to make judgment calls on how much to tweak one algorithm and how that may impact the rankings. We also learned how search quality reports are prioritized and some of the tools Google employees use to aid in that process. Amit talked about a QDF or “query deserves freshness” score or value to help fresh pages do well in the search results but yet not over shadow the older pages.

Matt Cutts of the Google Search Quality team wrote at his blog Five things you didn’t know about Google’s search. And I quote:

– Just because Google doesn’t always talk about search and journalists don’t always write about core search doesn’t mean stuff isn’t happening. Google devotes a ton of effort to improving our search in many different ways.
– Google makes a go/no-go decision on several different quality changes each week.
– If you want to build search loyalty, you have to get a lot of different things right.
– Google has many ways to prioritize feedback and tools to look at how to improve search.
– I’m glad we’re shedding light on some additional people at Google. Many people work behind the scenes to improve the user experience at Google, and we should look to highlight even more of those people.

More coverage at Techmeme.