Google Search Focus

Sometimes I find the Google blog posts to be long winded, high on hype, and low on information value. Yesterday's post about Google Search Quality started out in a similar vein, but it quickly improved and contains a number of interesting points about how Google handles searches and ranking. And for all those who like to say, "Just make it more like Google" and expect that to be a simple fix, please note the way Google describes their hard work on search quality is that "more than one thousand programmer/scientist years have gone directly into their development."

Several extracts that I found of interest include:

• Ranking algorithms include many aspects beyond PageRank:
  
• language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes)
• query models (how people use language 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)
• personalized models (not all people want the same thing)
• Evaluation includes automated evaluations every minute (to make sure nothing goes wrong)
• Change Frequency: "In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements"

While these do not, perhaps, have any direct bearing on how we can better use Google, it does help to inform us about the rationale for changing results and different processing from one day to the next.