Thanks to Joshua Berg for the share and Mark Traphagen for the +1, without that I'd never have seen this post.
I think I came across this a year or so back and was amazed that Google implements 500+ changes to its algorithm each year.
▼ Reshared Post From Joshua Berg ▼
How does Google make improvements to its search algorithms? Here's some interesting insight into how that process comes about, how the experimenting & then the live testing is done.
Amit Singhal In a year we launched over 500 changes to our algorithm.
So we change our algorithm almost twice a day.
Scott Huffman We really analyze each potential change very deeply to try to make sure that it's the right thing for users.
The process:
The first step in improving Google Search is coming up with an idea.
Ranking engineers come up with a hypothesis about what data, what signal could we integrate into our algorithm.
We test all these reasonable ideas through rigorous scientific testing.
We show raters a side-by-side for queries that the engineer's experiment might be affecting.
We then confirm these changes with live experiments on real users in the Sandbox.
We send a small fraction of actual Google traffic to the Sandbox.
In 2010 we ran over 20,000 different experiments.
All the data are then rolled up by a Search Analyst.
We then have a launch decision meeting where the leadership of the search team the looks at that data and makes a decision.
Amit Singhal If our scientific testing says this is a good idea for Google users, we will launch it on Google.
When you align Google's interest with user's interest as we have aligned, good things happen.
Mark Paskin We put a huge investment into understanding what works for users.
Amit Singhal: "Users keep coming back to Google even though they have a choice of a search engine every time they open a browser.
#GoogleSearch #SearchAlgorithm #SearchUpdates
http://click-to-read-mo.re/p/3Qb6
