I was very surprised and happy to read the new blog post about Google Search Quality on the Official Google Blog.

The blog post talks about the Search Quality team which are the people who bring us quality results for every search we make with the Google Search Engine.

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).

This post should definitely be a eye opener to many of those who want to know more about how Google Search works without actually knowing the internals of the system.

I am definitely open to hearing more such views from the Google Search Quality team and improve on suggestions they put forth.

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.

If you want to know the overview of how your pages are ranked in Google Search Results I would definitely ask you to read the post about the Introduction to Google Search Quality.