Google offers peek behind its search results

<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20097857-93/google-offers-peek-behind-its-search-results/?part=rss&subj=latest-news&tag=image"><img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" src="http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/08/26/google-search.png" alt="" /></a></div><p>Recognizing that it's no longer the only search engine in town, Google recently shed some light on how it keeps tweaking its algorithms to improve its search results.</p> <p> </p> <p>Last year, Google made more than 500 improvements to its search algorithms. In a <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/another-look-under-hood-of-search.html">blog published yesterday</a>, Google Fellow <a href="http://singhal.info/">Amit Singhal</a> explained how each new change may be based on a clever idea. But if it doesn't pass the company's rigorous testing, it doesn't get added to the mix.</p> <p>A video posted with the blog and displayed below tapped into comments from Google engineers, each offering their thoughts on how a change to an algorithm moves from initial idea to actual implementation.</p> <p>As the first step toward improving the user's search experience, Google often starts with a set of current searches that aren't working as well as expected. Engineers then put their heads together to determine what data can be integrated into an algorithm to improve that particular type of search.</p> <p>To test any new experiments made by engineers, Google relies on external people who've been trained to evaluate and compare different search rankings. Certain changes are also rolled out to a small number of actual users as part of a virtual sandbox. Last year alone, Google ran more than 20,000 different experiments.</p> <p>A single analyst then analyzes the data from ... <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20097857-93/google-offers-peek-behind-its-search-results/?part=rss&subj=latest-news&tag=readMore">[Read more]</a><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/cnet/tcoc/~4/UbnEjS7SQ84" height="1" width="1"/> [More]