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A Declining Internet

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/15/2025 - 23:30

For as broad and difficult of a problem running a search engine is and how many competing interests are involved, when Matt Cutts was at Google they ran a pretty clean show. Some of what they did before the algorithms could catch up was of course fearmongering (e.g. if you sell links you might be promoting fake brain cancer solutions) but Google generally did a pretty good job with the balance between organic and paid search.

Google's Hyung-Jin Kim Shares Google Search Ranking Signals

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/15/2025 - 23:29

On February 18, 2025 Google's Hyung-Jin Kim was interviewed about Google's ranking signals. Below are notes from that interview.
"Hand Crafting" of Signals
Almost every signal, aside from RankBrain and DeepRank (which are LLM-based) are hand-crafted and thus able to be analyzed and adjusted by engineers.

Google Antitrust Leaked Documents

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 11/11/2023 - 09:32

User interaction signals

Create relevancy signals out of user read, clicks, scrolls, and mouse hovers.
Not how search works

Search does not work by delivering results which match a query that ends at the user. This view of search is incomplete.
How search works

The flow of the engagement metrics from the end user / searcher back to the search engine helps the search engine refine the result set.
Fake document understanding

The Magical Black Box

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 09/24/2023 - 07:43

Google's mission statement is "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
That mission is so profound & so important the associated court documents in their antitrust cases must be withheld from public consumption.

New Google Ad Labeling

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 10/16/2022 - 00:56

TechCrunch recently highlighted how Google is changing their ad labeling on mobile devices.
A few big changes include:

  • ad label removed from individual ad units
  • where the unit-level label was instead becomes a favicon
  • a "Sponsored" label above ads
  • the URL will show right of the favicon & now the site title will be in a slightly larger font above the URL

An example of the new layout is here:

Helpful Content Update

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 08/19/2022 - 08:15

Granular Panda
Reading the tea leaves on the pre-announced Google "helpful content" update it sounds like a second and perhaps more granular version of Panda which can take in additional signals, including how unique the page level content is & the language structure on the pages.
Like Panda, the algorithm will update periodically across time & impact websites on a sitewide basis.
Cold Hot Takes

Automating Ourselves Out of Existence

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 05/23/2022 - 15:22

Time has grown more scarce after having a child, so I rarely blog anymore. Though I thought it probably made sense to make at least a quarterly(ish) post so people know I still exist.
One of the big things I have been noticing over the past year or so is an increasing level of automation in ways that are not particularly brilliant. :D
Just from this past week I've had 3 treat encounters on this front.

Engineering Search Outcomes

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 01/19/2022 - 12:49

Kent Walker promotes public policies which advantage the Google monopoly.
His role doing that means he has to write some really bad hot takes that lack context or intentionally & dishonestly redirect attention away from core issues - that's his job.
With that in mind, his most recent blog post defending the Google monopoly was exceptional.
Force Ranking of Inferior Search Results