Google`s Udi Manber Looks at Search - Algorithm Adjustments
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Even though Manber advises searchers not to think of search engines as people who might understand their queries, he notes that Google is working in that direction. “We will take your query and try to ‘understand’ it and match it as best we can to the content we find on the web,” he explained.
As you would expect, this takes a lot of work and adaptation; the search team at Google made no fewer than 450 modifications to the algorithm last year. That’s more than one every day -- and may go some way to explaining why it’s sometimes best to wait a few days when you see your position in the SERPs change rather than immediately assume that you’ve done something wrong and must fix it right away.
Likewise, you should not assume, when you go through that kind of bounce, that Google has it in for you personally. Yes, there are people working on the algorithm at Google, but they are not personally manipulating the results. Contrary to a recent Ranked Hard SEO comic strip, Manber said that “At Google we do not manually change results…we do not have the capability…We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm -- we have to go and actually change the algorithm. That is, we have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused [a poor result] and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution.”
This slows down the process, but it also reduces bias and forces more discipline on the search engineers. Of course, not everyone believes that the algorithm can’t be manipulated manually, and inevitably someone will tell a story that seems to “prove” that Google can reach in and tweak things by hand. One of the comments to a Popular Mechanics interview of Udi Manber gave the example of posting “a comment about a funny result and within 15 minutes of it being posted it was gone. The result was a Wiki article ranking #2 for the search GOOGLE. I commented on it at a place where I know Google engineers read and it was gone fast.”
As an answer to that, it’s worth noting that changes in Google’s algorithm and search results do propagate fast. “If something new happens in the world and you search for it,” Manber explained, “I’m not going to give you an exact time, but within an hour you will see in the direct results pages that relate to that story.” And items quickly make it from the index to the search page. “It’s also the case that if you do the same search on different days you may get different results, because some of the results are things we indexed five minutes ago.”
It’s also worth noting, in reference again to the Ranked Hard comic strip, that Google maintains a “church and state” separation between the advertising side and the search engine algorithm. The search engineers hold weekly meetings where they look at the proposed improvements “and we look at all the evaluations and we make decisions -- revenues and any effects on ads do not come into those meetings,” Manber emphasized. “We don’t even know what the effects are. We make decisions solely based on how good it is for search.”
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