Google, a company particularly vocal about their belief in open technology, are nonetheless notoriously closed about one thing: their search service. Their argument for this is that, were they to ‘open up’ the machinery of their algorithm for all to see, it would be too easy for web developers to game the system ultimately producing less genuine quality results for users.
Anyway, it is because of this situation that the following post over at Techcrunch is very interesting – because it contains a rare example (in video form) of Google granting some sort of behind the scenes access to their most prized possession; their search algorithm. While the short clip is hardly as detailed as it could be (for the reasons already mentioned above), it does nonetheless shed some new light on how things work with one of our most used and well known technological innovations of the past decade.
The main points cover how Google amend their algorithm when it isn’t producing sufficiently satisfying results for a particular search term as well as the means by which the engine decides that you mistyped your desired search term, and so displays results for what it thinks you wanted instead.
So, it’s not exactly enough for developers to suddenly leap 10 pages up the search results ranking, or even to influence SEO to any extent at all, but it is interesting nonetheless – and possibly an indication that the company might be slightly more open about certain aspects of its search in the future (though probably not the ones which would really impact on SEO strategies).
