Search Quality is the name of the team responsible for the ranking of Google search results. Our job is clear: A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them — and in what order. Lately, we have been doing other things as well. But more on that later.

For something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design. We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse. Competition is pretty straightforward. No company wants to share its secret recipes with its competitors. As for abuse, if we make our ranking formulas too accessible, we make it easier for people to game the system. Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse.

The details of the ranking algorithms are in many ways Google’s crown jewels. We are very proud of them and very protective of them. By some estimate, more than one thousand programmer/scientist years have gone directly into their development, and the rate of innovation has not slowed down.

But being completely secretive isn’t ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past. We will try to periodically tell you about new things, explain old things, give advice, spread news, and engage in conversations. Let me start with some general pieces of information about our group. More blog posts will follow.

I should take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Udi Manber, and I am a VP of engineering at Google in charge of Search Quality. I have been at Google for over two years, and I have been working on search technologies for almost 20 years.

The heart of the group is the team that works on core ranking. Ranking is hard, much harder than most people realize. One reason for this is that languages are inherently ambiguous, and documents do not follow any set of rules. There are really no standards for how to convey information, so we need to be able to understand all web pages, written by anyone, for any reason. And that’s just half of the problem. We also need to understand the queries people pose, which are on average fewer than three words, and map them to our understanding of all documents. Not to mention that different people have different needs. And we have to do all of that in a few milliseconds.

The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

Another team in our group is responsible for evaluating how well we’re doing. This is done in many different ways, but the goal is always the same: improve the user experience. This is not the main goal, it is the only goal. There are automated evaluations every minute (to make sure nothing goes wrong), periodic evaluations of our overall quality, and, most importantly, evaluations of specific algorithmic improvements. When an engineer gets a new idea and develops a new algorithm, we test their ideas thoroughly. We have a team of statisticians who look at all the data and determine the value of the new idea. We meet weekly (sometimes twice a week) to go over those new ideas and approve new launches. In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements, about 9 per week on the average. Some of these improvements are simple and obvious — for example, we fixed the way Hebrew acronym queries are handled (in Hebrew an acronym is denoted by a (”) next to the last character, so IBM will be IB”M), and some are very complicated — for example, we made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January. Most of the time we look for improvements in relevancy, but we also work on projects where the sole purpose is to simplify the algorithms. Simple is good.

International search has been one of our key focus areas in the past two years. This means all spoken languages, not just the major ones. Last year, for example, we made major improvements in Azerbaijani, a language spoken by about 8 million people. In the past few months, we launched spell checking in Estonian, Catalan, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukranian, Bosnian, Latvian, Filipino Tagalog, Slovenian and Farsi. We organized a network of people all over the world who provide us with feedback, and we have a large set of volunteers from all parts of Google who speak different languages and help us improve search.

Another team is dedicated to new features and new user interfaces. Having a great engine is necessary for a great car, but it is not sufficient. The car has to be comfortable and easy to drive. The Google search user interface is quite simple. Very few of our users ever read our help pages, and they can do very well without them (but they’re good reading nevertheless, and we’re working to improve them). When we add new features we try to ensure that they will be intuitive and easy to use for everyone. One of the most visible changes we made in the past year was Universal Search. Others include the Google Notebook, Custom Search Engines, and of course, many improvements to iGoogle. The UI team is helped by a team of usability experts who conduct user studies and evaluate new features. They travel all over the world, and they even go to people’s homes to see users in their natural habitat. (Don’t worry, they do not come unannounced or uninvited!)

There is a whole team that concentrates on fighting webspam and other types of abuse. That team works on variety of issues from hidden text to off-topic pages stuffed with gibberish keywords, plus many other schemes that people use in an attempt to rank higher in our search results. The team spots new spam trends and works to counter those trends in scalable ways; like all other teams, they do it internationally. The webspam group works closely with the Google Webmaster Central team, so they can share insights with everyone and also listen to site owners.

There are other teams devoted to particular projects. In general, our organizational structure is quite informal. People move around, and new projects start all the time.

One of the key things about search is that users’ expectations grow rapidly. Tomorrow’s queries will be much harder than today’s queries. Just as Moore’s law governs the doubling of computing speed every 18 months, there is a hidden unwritten law that doubles the complexity of our most difficult queries in a short time. This is impossible to measure precisely, but we all feel it. We know we cannot rest on our laurels, we have to work hard to meet the challenge. As I mentioned earlier, we will continue providing you with updates on search quality in the coming months, so stay tuned.

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Situation one is that you own a ‘real world’ business that sells widgets. You have a customer list of people who have bought your widgets before, so you can use your blog as a regular newsletter to which you publish all of your latest special offers, discount deals, news and so on.

It is a fantastic way of keeping in touch with your existing customers and, by publishing regular news bulletins through the company blog site, it offers a way to invite potential new customers to have a look inside your organization too, before they decide whether or not they want to work with you.

Of course, the limitation of using a blog for a real world business selling tangible physical products is that no blog or website can actually deliver the product for you. However, in situation two, where you are using a blog to promote an online or Internet marketing business, even that can be achieved through your blog site to a certain extent.

Let’s imagine that your business is selling a website traffic generation service to other businesses on the net who want to increase the people that see their own sites.

You can write about all of the latest traffic ideas that you have and promote your services through the blog.

You would also most probably have a ‘buy now’ button featured somewhere very prominently on the front page.

You might also review traffic generation products from other companies, and carry links on your blog that would take the reader directly to the sales page for the product in question, if they have an interest in finding out more.

Although (as Wikipedia points out) blogging was initially a text based publishing medium, it is now increasingly becoming linked to other media, such as video, as well.

So, not only can you write reviews but you can even create short movies to do the same as well, and publish them to your blog (and other places, as we shall see later).

You can create video presentations about your business, your products or basically whatever else you want, and have it out there in front of a potential audience of over 1 billion people in a matter of minutes.

It has been said that there are ‘three cornerstones’ to online success and that they are visitor traffic, visibility and perceived credibility.

This is a critical concept to grasp, and one to which I will return time and again. A blog site is such a powerful marketing tool because it allows you to address all three of these requirements through the one simple site, as you are just about to discover.

It may seem a little strange to be asking whether something that people have been talking about for three years exists or not, but the reason is that there is no easy-topin-down definition of what Web 2.0 actually is.

Indeed, a measure of just how difficult it is to define Web 2.0 is that it is far easier to tie down what it is not!

For example, it is not a particular type of website, although some sites (especially internet marketing product sales pages produced over the last six months or so) are becoming recognizable as Web 2.0 ‘style’ sites.

More and more of these sites are moving away from strong, garish colors in sales page backgrounds and reverting to plain white or grey backgrounds.

Whilst these are not Web 2.0 sites – there is no such ting – nevertheless, simplicity and plainness in site design is making a big comeback!

The fact is that, if there is only one factor that can be said to represent Web 2.0, it can be summed up as interactivity.

Web 2.0 is all about the idea that people should have some kind of input to the sites that they are viewing, again perhaps best described by comparison with the ‘old’ style of websites back when we had what might be called Web 1.0.

Those old style sites tended to be static - you read them and then moved on. There was no requirement for you to do anything other than read and accept the information that the site gave you.

The essence of Web 2.0 is that sites that you are viewing will invite you to do something.

So, maybe when you go to a commercial website for a big international company, the site asks you to leave comments of perhaps take a quick survey? They are asking you for feedback of some kind, whether it is on the story that you have just read, or about the site itself.

They are asking you to interact with them.

Alternatively, Web 2.0 sites can be community sites where users join and then have the ability to create their own individuals pages or ‘spaces’ within the community.

Then they have the opportunity of inviting their friends to join too.

It can also be of sites that allow viewers to post pictures, videos, sound bites, comments and questions.

Web 2.0 is also about blogs where info and feedback can be added to the sites. So, does Web 2.0 actually exist?

The answer is, who the heck knows or cares?

What clearly does exist is a movement to greater interactivity between sites and their viewers on the web. If that is Web 2.0 or nor is really pretty irrelevant as far as I can see!

However, the problem that I see with Web 2.0 is that a lot of folks far wiser and more knowledgeable than me are telling us that it is an Internet ‘revolution’.

And, like all ‘revolutions’ the tendency has been to throw away everything from the old pre-revolution days, whether good or bad.

So it is that many of the things that worked well but that unfortunately represented Web 1.0 have been forgotten or swept under the carpet in the seemingly headlong rush to unquestioningly adopt everything that is Web 2.0.

Maybe this makes me sound like a Luddite or something, but one of my objectives on this website is to show that, alongside all the modern Web 2.0 ‘stuff’, it is still an idea to turn the clock back a little, to show how some aspects of what I am calling the Web 1.0 era still work, and work well.

In particular, I believe that a lot of very valid traffic generations techniques that worked back before Web 2.0 came along can still work pretty well today, especially when combined with some techniques and ideas that are usually categorized as representing Web 2.0.

So, in a nutshell, this book is all combining the best of the old and the new, taking what worked before and what is working now in terms of driving traffic to your site, and putting them together into one cohesive plan.

It is also going to attempt to look into the future too, where the market is going to, because some pointers to the future development of online business and site traffic are already becoming fairly clear.

So, does Web 2.0 actually exist, or is it just a trendy phrase that was invented by a superb marketing specialist?

In my opinion, I would say that the true answer to that is, a bit of both!

I think that the reason that the phrase caught on is that it captures the imagination, and sounds fresh and exciting.

I also think it undeniable that interactivity is a feature of the net in a way that it certainly wasn’t three years ago.

But, just because something is fresh and new does not automatically mean that everything before is necessarily dull and stale, as this website will clearly demonstrate!