Google's Vice president in Engineering for Search Quality Mr .Udi Manber opens up more with the inner working on Search Quality with Google. He vaguely explains the inner working on Google and the various methods they use to rank a website in Google. Some of the highlighted points of his posts are the way he describes about factors that are used to return a document relevant to the query.

1. Pagerank: PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
Pagerank as per Udi Manber is still in use though not the way it used to be primary factor but now just part of a bigger algorithm.

2. Ability to Handle phrases: As per Mr.Manber Google's ability to handle phrases play an important role when it comes to ranking a webpage. The better the algorithm understands the phrase better the results will be.

3. synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes - Google sees synonyms spelling errors and other factors to return relevant results. ( Diacritics - A mark, such as the cedilla of façade or the acute accent of resumé, added to a letter to indicate a special phonetic value or distinguish words that are otherwise graphically identical. )

4. query models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today)

5. 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) - I have seen this more and more with Google in recent days for some keywords Google wants to rank new documents immediately and over few days the document drops out of Google's index only to return later in a position Google decides best for its users.

6. personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

"we made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January"
I feel this is where the testing is not done throughly because for lot of high quality sites inner pages are showing grey bar in Google toolbar pagerank display. Its very ambigous what Google thinks about these pages are they not worth for Google anymore? Are they penalized in any way? Do they needs to be fixed in some way?

Google has left us guessing with this particular change IMHO.

Thanks anyway for Mr.Udi to give an excellent writeup we are very happy to see this,
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html

Labels: Google

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