On Friday, Google's Ben Gomes of the search quality team blogged about Google's search interface. This follows the earlier coverage from Udi Manber about search quality. In this post, Ben Gomes talks about "the principles that guide our development of the overall search experience and how they are applied to the key aspects of search." He explains that the goal of Google is to give you the most relevant result in the fastest period of time. Google does this by applying several principles:
- A small page, which Gomes says "is quick to download and generally faster for your browser to display."
- Complex algorithms with a simple presentation. Google hides the complexity of search behind a clean interface.
- Features that work everywhere, as in all languages and all countries.
- Data driven decisions, which are assisted by experimentation.
Ben Gomes goes on to explain the difficulties Google encounters -- what kind of result is best? Images or video or text? What about for misspellings? What about extracting titles from pages that don't specify an HTML title (and are thus not SEO'd properly?!) The entire Google post deserves some attention as it's interesting to see what Ben has to say. Additionally, see what Matt Cutts says about the post.
At WebmasterWorld, forum members also note the observation about titles that I found interesting. One forum member says that the H1 tag might be what Google is using. Or that it's a "text string headed up with umpteen nonbreaking spaces and followed with a linebreak."
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
