There was an interesting video on YouTube from the Google Internet Summit 2009 http://bit.ly/iiAld . There was a presentation by Udi Manber, Head of Search Quality at Google talking about how search quality is being improved. Udi started simply enough by stating that Google strives to answer every question in every question in a personalised fashion in under 100 milliseconds for free as 'very, very hard'. He added that Google database is measured in Petabytes which is 1,000,000 gigabytes! He delivered this in a matter of fact fashion which is pretty scary in itself.
Once he allowed his audience to catch their breath he did provide some other interesting Google facts such as making 450 changes to the Google algorithm in 2007 and the constant experimentation to try and improve the quality of search results. Udi also covered the traditional ways that Google determine search results however he spent some time on the way Google are moving in trying to understand the person asking the question. He explained that they do this by summarising both all the information they have and summarise the question and try to match them.
What goes into a summary? Udi explained summary as covering a number of factors including ;'language' so Google knows that 'childcare' and 'child care' and 'daycare' are all very similar. They also take account of both the time and place of the search as well as the context of the search. The last point was the personalised search where Google must be keeping track of the users use of the Web such as previous searches. The information Google will have on a user will only increase with the increase of the huge suit of Google online products such as Docs, Gmail and in time Wave.
What does this mean from a Web site owners point of view? Web content has always been important and it looks like Google are getting better at working out the language so less effort at covering all possible aspects of your keyword phrases. More effort on keeping your content fresh and anything that happens in your business area should be posted on the news section of your Web site. Keep your local listing up to date. Use your Analytics and feed back from social media to create new pages.
