Google Ranking: No Humans Allowed!

Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google Ranking

Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

And they really mean #3!

No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common – but misguided! – question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well … subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

It would be nice if a breath of candor were introduced here.

• Humans aren’t scalable.
• Humans aren’t subject to Moore’s law.
• Humans aren’t deniable.
• Humans Not Allowed is as much about $ as about search quality.
  

As Amit Singhal undoubtedly knows, many IR studies have found that a combination of humans with algorithms works better than either alone. Not that that’s a universal truth, but it has been a common pattern.

The good news is that as long as humans are out of the loop in Google, there will be an opportunity for human experts to add value using such old-fashioned technologies as the book.

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