Udi Manber talks about search at Google in a recent post on the Google blog. If you’re interested in search or search engine optimization (SEO), the post is definitely worth a read. Udi discusses items from big (Google revamped how it computes PageRank in January) to small (in Hebrew, an acronym like IBM would be written as IB”M).
But you know what my favorite tidbit is? Udi talks a little about how the Search Quality group is organized. He mentions topics such as core ranking, evaluation, and webspam. This post makes it crystal clear that I have a limited role in overall search quality at Google. I can’t help but laugh when someone refers to me as Google’s head of search quality, because that’s not remotely close to true. I’m the head of the webspam team, which is just one part of the search quality group. Here’s how to think of search quality at Google:
As this hand-done bit of an org chart shows, webspam is just one group under the overall umbrella of search quality. The webspam group gets a lot of attention from the SEO community, but there are so many other people and teams that tackle search quality at Google — everything from synonyms and snippets to personalization and international search quality. I’m grateful to work with talented colleagues directly in my team, but I also really appreciate the chance to work with great people in the search quality team as a whole.
Anyway, check out Udi’s post and you’ll probably learn a thing or two about how we think about search quality at Google.