Google defends search result rankings
Singhal acknowledged that other search engines take a different approach, butargued that these too are imperfect.
“Other search engines approach this differently, selecting some results oneat a time, manually curating what you see on the page,” he said.
“We believe that an approach which relies heavily on an individual’s tastesand preferences just doesn’t produce the quality and relevant ranking that ouralgorithms do.
“And given the hundreds of millions of queries we have to handle every day,it wouldn’t be feasible to handle each by hand anyway.”
Google tinkers with the algorithms every day, according to Singhal, and usesmany different ‘signals’ to create its search results.
“There’s a ton that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system likeours. Our algorithms use hundreds of different signals to pick the top resultsfor any given query,” he said.
“Signals are indicators of relevance, and they include items as simple as thewords on a web page or more complex calculations such as the authoritativenessof other sites linking to any given page.
“Those signals and our algorithms are in constant flux, and are constantlybeing improved. On average, we make one or two changes to them every day.”
Singhal reiterated that search is not perfect, but said that Google continuesto work at the technology.
“Ultimately, search is nowhere near a solved problem. Although I’ve been atthis for almost two decades now, I’d still guess that search isn’t quite out ofits infancy yet,” he explained.
“The science is probably just about at the point where we’re crawling. Soonwe’ll walk. I hope that, in my lifetime, I’ll see search enter its adolescence.”
Google defends search result rankings
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