search algorithm, we've always known that Google puts a tremendous
amount of time, money, and effort into making their results match
their users' needs. Now, we have an idea of how much tweaking is done:
a lot.
Their "search scientists" test the changes they make in a sandbox
environment to see how each change, twist, addition, and omission
reacts to various searches and search types.
"Just last year we launched over 500 changes to our algorithm so by
some count we change our algorithm almost every day, almost twice
over," said Google Fellow Amit Singhal.
Many of these changes happen simultaneously, so some days may have no
changes, but if you average out 500 changes over a year, that's about
1 change every 17.5 hours.
"There are almost always a set of motivating searches and these
searches are not performing as well as we'd like," said Engineering
Director Scott Huffman. "Ranking engineers then come up with a
hypothesis about what signal, what data could we integrate into our
algorithm."
We often take for granted how search engines come up with their
results, but this video helps to break it down for us in layman's
terms.
