The Man Behind Google's Ranking Algorithm

nbauman writes "New York Times interview with Amit Singhal, who is in charge of Google's ranking algorithm. They use 200 "signals" and "classifiers," of which PageRank is only one. "Freshness" defines how many recently changed pages appear in a result. They assumed old pages were better, but when they first introduced Google Finance, the algorithm couldn't find it because it was too new. Some topics are "hot". "When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds," said Singhal. Classifiers infer information about the type of search, whether it is a product to buy, a place, company or person. One classifier identifies people who aren't famous. Another identifies brand names. A final check encourages "diversity" in the results, for example, a manufacturer's page, a blog review, and a comparison shopping site."

Re:Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, they shoot idiots why don't realize this joke is dead.

Feature Request

[rueger]

My ongoing gripe with Google is the number of times when the first page is filled with shopping sites, "review" pages, and click through pages that exist only to grab you onto the way to where you really want to go.

I would love a switch, or even a subscription, that would allow me to filter these usually useless types of pages and instead show me pages with real content.

Re:Many other things are goo(gle)d

[mattpointblank]

Could it not simply be that they're not keeping it under wraps to avoid sneaky webmasters manipulating their sites, but to prevent competitors gaining an edge?

Re:Googling Uncommon Characters and Exact Phrases

[Blikkie]

One of the most annoying things about google for me is how it interprets queries with strange characters common to almost all programming languages.

You should try google code search [google.com].

Google is human too

[polarbeer]

One interesting thing about the article was the down-to-earth lack of abstraction in the problems described, such as the teak patio palo alto problem. Other search engines brag about their web-filtered-by-humans approach, as opposed to the "cold" algorithmic approach of Google. But it turns out Google is pretty human too, only with higher ambitions of creating generalizations from the human observations.

Re:Googling Uncommon Characters and Exact Phrases

[drix]

I have the same problem. But if you're searching for actual code, you're better off using a code search engine [koders.com]. Or as others have pointed out, search "ruby append operator" if you're interested in the concept.

The most annoying thing about Google's results...

[Shohat]

I find it extremely annoying the google indexes blogs.
Blogs are read only by bloggers and the press, and present absolutely no interest to normal people (including me). Currently, because of google's idiotic blog fetish, I have to eliminate 50% of the results just based on URLs, hoping that I won't stumble upon someone's personal ramblings. Blogs became popular only due to google's absolutely unexplainable love to blog content, and sticking it into perfectly normal search results, it's like searching in a world-wide-Myspace now.
The most amazing thing is when Google puts blog search results above the source of the story, to which the blogs are linking in the first place. I'm just waiting for this fad to die out like podcasting did. Unfortunatly, google controls the popularity blogging so it won't die out naturally, google at least has to stop indexing them... or put a "show/hide blog results" checkbox...

Re:The most annoying thing about Google's results.

[Shohat]

Slashdot is as much of a blog as I am a Egyptian gerbil. Slashdot links to stories that generate discussions. Slashdot is NOT about the people that create the posts, but about the people that comment here.

Re:Algorithm?

[mestar]

So how do you call the "thing" that you use to impement a heuristic?