The New York Times recently ran an article titled Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine. The article was not only incredibly well written from an SEO viewpoint (something rare for mainstream media) but it provides an excellent insight into the inner workings of Google.

Mr. Singhal is Google’s “ranking algorithm” master and heads-up their Search Quality division. Throughout the article he discusses the human interaction and review process for various search terms. One example provided by Mr. Singhal is…

Some complaints involve simple flaws that need to be fixed right away. Recently, a search for “French Revolution” returned too many sites about the recent French presidential election campaign — in which candidates opined on various policy revolutions — rather than the ouster of King Louis XVI. A search-engine tweak gave more weight to pages with phrases like “French Revolution” rather than pages that simply had both words.

Mr. Singhal also talks about (what he calls) the ‘Freshness’ of a site and its impact on the sites ranking. Most SEOs would be familiar with Google’s sandbox and the fact that they put a much greater weight on older websites due to the perceived authority of the site (like my parents always told me – respect your elders). However this is not necessarily the best way to rank a website purely on its age as Mr. Singhal points out…

Freshness, which describes how many recently created or changed pages are included in a search result, is at the centre of a constant debate in search: Is it better to provide new information or to display pages that have stood the test of time and are more likely to be of higher quality? Until now, Google has preferred pages old enough to attract others to link to them.

But last year, Mr. Singhal started to worry that Google’s balance was off. When the company introduced its new stock quotation service, a search for “Google Finance” couldn’t find it. After monitoring similar problems, he assembled a team of three engineers to figure out what to do about them.

Isn’t it funny how this was never addressed until Google discovered that it negatively affected their own site.

The article also talks about a lot more that I won’t go into here, but the final point I wanted to make reference to is something that I find myself having to explain over and over again – the importance (or more accurately, the lack of importance) in Page Rank. Don’t get me wrong – it is still a factor that should be considered but there are a lot of other things that should also be taken into consideration…

…Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls “signals.” PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages — like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years…

Ok, I’ve said enough about this now, but for more information on the article, check-out Rand’s post from SEOmoz.org – Remarkable Openness from Google’s Black Box Thanks to Saul Hansel. Rand goes into a lot more detail than I do and if you want another perspective, Aaron Wall from SEObook.com also talks about it here – Inside Google’s Black Box.

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