This video is about Google's search leaders Matt Cutts, Ben Gomes and Amit Singhal who give you an inside look on how search works, they share stories on what it has been like to work together over the past decade, and discuss where they see search heading in the future. Moderated by Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan.It is a must view for all the people who are passionate about search and want to have an insight about how Google deals with search and search algorithms.
Some of the points discussed in the video are:
Amit Singhal introduces himself and says that academically he has done Masters In Search and a PhD in search – (Well he says yes there is such a thing but this back when search was the sleepy domain for the librarians)
Ben Golmes shares that when he joined Google his previous Boss had asked him “Do you think Google will ever be 1/10th size of Altavista?”
Matt Cutts introduces himself and says that he was a graphics guy and wrote the first version of safe search at Google and in the process found out that there are bad guys on the internet and since then he has been dealing with them now as the head of the web spam team of Google.
We take simple principles of how language behaves and build algorithms based on those principles in an environment of the modern web.In the real world these algorithms are challenged with all its complexities and the most relevant pages have to be produced for the query made by the user.
Danny Sullivan asks Google how do you decide what is not working and what is broken and how to fix it?
Amit Singhal says all their algorithmic changes are based on one principle that is - So what is best for the user, they develop science around it and then measure what is best for the user.
He further says that there is rigorous testing done before they finalize on any ranking algorithm update. There are approx. 500 changes to algorithm every year and Google runs around 20000 tests every year.
The answers to the following questions are considered along with many other considerations before deciding to go ahead with the new algorithm.
- Is it good for the web eco system at large?
- Would it benefit authors?
- Would it benefit high quality content?
- Would it keep the Google system simple so that it can be maintained much longer?
Ben Golmes adds that being very rigorous for testing is essential to the speed of moving fast so that they are constantly sure that they are the best for the users at any given point.
Matt Cutts says that at times under certain circumstances they may take manual action.
Matt says at Google we are obsessed about speed and we would like to give the most relevant result as fast as possible to the user.
All search in the future seems to be mobile and Danny Sullivan adds that we will not even be searching but it will be happening to us.
