Friday, June 5, 2009
Google and the Evolution of Search III: What’s Next in Search? Much, Much Better Search
For many years, Google, on its Explanation of Our Search Results page, claimed that “a site’s ranking in Google’s search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.” Then in May of 2007, that statement changed: “A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.” In this third and final interiew with Google’s search team, Google Fellow Amit Singhal helps us understand why.
Google’s objective evaluation and ranking of Web sites is to some extent defined by subjective reasoning of a collective human intelligence. And so it must be if Google is to continue returning search results that we perceive to be the “best” answers to our search queries. In the second of three interviews, Google software engineer Matt Cutts talks about the role of human evaluators in counteracting spam.
