Singhal, a gentle man in his forties, is a Google Fellow, an honorific bestowed upon him four years ago to reward his rewrite of the search engine in He jabs the Enter key. In a time span best measured in a hummingbird's wing-flaps, a page of links appears. It's a fairly innocuous search — the kind that Google's servers handle billions of times a day — but it is deceptively complicated. Type those same words into Bing, for instance, and the first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy.
Several pages into the results, there's no direct referral to Siwek. The comparison demonstrates the power, even intelligence, of Google's algorithm, honed over countless iterations. It possesses the seemingly magical ability to interpret searchers' requests — no matter how awkward or misspelled.
Google refers to that ability as search quality, and for years the company has closely guarded the process by which it delivers such accurate results. But now I am sitting with Singhal in the search giant's Building 43, where the core search team works, because Google has offered to give me an unprecedented look at just how it attains search quality.
The subtext is clear: You may think the algorithm is little more than an engine, but wait until you get under the hood and see what this baby can really do.
Google's search algorithm is a work in progress — constantly tweaked and refined to return higher-quality results. Here are some of the most significant additions and adaptations since the dawn of PageRank. This search engine, which had run on Stanford's servers for almost two years, is renamed Google. Its breakthrough innovation: ranking searches based on the number and quality of incoming links. The search algorithm is completely revamped to incorporate additional ranking criteria more easily.
Google's first patent is granted for this feature, which gives more weight to links from authoritative sites. This initiative allows Google to update its index constantly, instead of in big batches. Users can choose to let Google mine their own search behavior to provide individualized results.
The story of Google's algorithm begins with PageRank, the system invented in by cofounder Larry Page while he was a grad student at Stanford. Page's now legendary insight was to rate pages based on the number and importance of links that pointed to them — to use the collective intelligence of the Web itself to determine which sites were most relevant.
It was a simple and powerful concept, and — as Google quickly became the most successful search engine on the Web — Page and cofounder Sergey Brin credited PageRank as their company's fundamental innovation. But that wasn't the whole story. Web search is a multipart process. First, Google crawls the Web to collect the contents of every accessible site. This data is broken down into an index organized by word, just like the index of a textbook , a way of finding any page based on its content.
Every time a user types a query, the index is combed for relevant pages, returning a list that commonly numbers in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. The trickiest part, though, is the ranking process — determining which of those pages belong at the top of the list. That's where the contextual signals come in. All search engines incorporate them, but none has added as many or made use of them as skillfully as Google has.
PageRank itself is a signal, an attribute of a Web page in this case, its importance relative to the rest of the Web that can be used to help determine relevance. Some of the signals now seem obvious. Early on, Google's algorithm gave special consideration to the title on a Web page — clearly an important signal for determining relevance. Another key technique exploited anchor text, the words that make up the actual hyperlink connecting one page to another.
As a result, "when you did a search, the right page would come up, even if the page didn't include the actual words you were searching for," says Scott Hassan, an early Google architect who worked with Page and Brin at Stanford. The search engine currently uses more than signals to help rank its results. Google's engineers have discovered that some of the most important signals can come from Google itself. PageRank has been celebrated as instituting a measure of populism into search engines: the democracy of millions of people deciding what to link to on the Web.
But Singhal notes that the engineers in Building 43 are exploiting another democracy — the hundreds of millions who search on Google. The data people generate when they search — what results they click on, what words they replace in the query when they're unsatisfied, how their queries match with their physical locations — turns out to be an invaluable resource in discovering new signals and improving the relevance of results. The most direct example of this process is what Google calls personalized search — a feature that uses someone's search history and location as signals to determine what kind of results they'll find useful.
Take, for instance, the way Google's engine learns which words are synonyms. So someone would say, 'pictures of dogs,' and then they'd say, 'pictures of puppies.
We also learned that when you boil water, it's hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance. But there were obstacles. Google's synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot.
But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories about how words are defined by context. Core web vitals and the quality of user experience on your website will be used to determine the ranking of your site compared to similar websites in organic search results.
Now, the question is which metrics will be used to determine user experience going forward. Well, there you have it! Google is an authority when it comes to connecting users with the information they need. At Konstruct Digital, we want to ensure that our clients have a smooth ride on their way to growth and success. This is why we stay up to date on upcoming Google algorithm updates to help our clients find the right strategies to reach their goals.
At this point, we feel pretty confident in assuming you have an interest in improving your SEO strategies. Contact us to find out how our SEO experts can help your search visibility, traffic, and sales skyrocket with our award-winning SEO services.
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October 11th SEO Joel Messner. September 28th SEO Brady Bateman. August 23rd But why is Google the search engine of choice for billions of people across the globe? Updated: May 31, Get monthly tips to level-up your marketing. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Learn something new?
Share it with a friend. Amanda Thomas Managing Partner Amanda is passionate about business growth through digital marketing. Still not convinced? We guarantee you will be after just one call Let's Talk. If you want to know specifically about keywords check out this article on how search engines use keywords. In this video Matt Cutts from Google explains the basics of how Google works. We're going to go into a bit more detail than this video does.
But it's a great primer to the content. As mentioned in the video Google crawls the web using a bit of a code called a 'spider'. This is a small program that follows links from one page to the next and each page it lands on is copied and passed on to the servers. The web hence spider is huge, and as such if Google were to keep a record of all the content it found it would be unmanageable.
This is why Google only records the page code and will dump pages it doesn't think are useful duplicates, low value, etc.
Spiders work in a very specific way, hopping from link to link discovering new pages. This is why if your content is not linked to it won't get indexed. When a new domain is encountered the spider will first look for this page: domain. Any messages you have for the spider, such as what content you want to be indexed or where to find your sitemap, can be left on this page. The spider should then follow these instructions.
However, it doesn't have to. Google's spiders are generally well behaved through and will respect the commands left here. You can find out more about how robots. The spider itself is a small, simple program. There are lots of open source versions which you can download and let loose on the web yourself for free. As vital as it is to Google, finding the content is not the clever bit. That comes next. When you have a large amount of content you need a way to shortcut to that content.
Google can't just have one big database containing all the pages, which they sort through every time a query is entered. It would be way too slow. Instead, they create an index which essentially shortcuts this process. Search engines use technology such as Hadoop to manage and query large amounts of data very quickly. Searching the index is far quicker than searching the entire database each time. Common words such as 'and', 'the', 'if' are not stored.
These are known as stop words. It might be a very small amount of space per page, but when dealing with billions of pages it becomes an important consideration. This kind of thinking is worth bearing in mind when trying to understand Google and the decisions it makes. A small per page change can be very different at scale. The content has now been indexed. So Google has taken a copy of it and placed a shortcut to the page in the index. Great, it can now be found and displayed when matching a relevant search query.
Each search you make in Google will likely have 's of results, so now Google needs to decide what order it's going to display the results in. This is really at the heart of SEO - adjusting factors to manipulate the order of results. Google decides which query goes where through the algorithm. An algorithm is a generic term which means a process or rule-set that's followed in order to solve a problem. In reference to Google, this is the set of weighted metrics which determines the order in which they rank the page.
The Google algorithm is not the mystery it once was and the individual factors and metrics which it is made up of are fairly well documented. We know what all the major on-page and off-page metrics are. The tricky bit is in understanding the weighting or correlation between them.
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