Google's John Mueller: Learning About Information Retrieval Will Be Useful

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that "learning how information retrieval algorithms work will be useful, even if it's not used 1:1 in the same way." This comes after he said that focusing on tf-idf algorithms and the metrics there may be short-sighted and not a good use of your time.

As referenced by DeepCrawl, John Mueller said that John Mueller's recommendation is not to focus on these (tf-idf) artificial metrics because you can’t reproduce the metric because it is based on the overall index and it is an old metric and things evolve. Focusing on one metric like this is short sighted thinking.

.@JohnMu recommends not focusing on tf-idf because it is a very old metric and algorithms have evolved a lot since then. Using tf-idf to squeeze words into your pages is unlikely to be useful and is a short-sighted approach.#HangoutNotes: https://t.co/vvNaJMJxoT pic.twitter.com/XCaCwKCNcH

— DeepCrawl (@DeepCrawl) May 4, 2019

He was specifically talking about SEOs using this to add or remove more words on a page, as a specific factor.

But in general, John said in a tweet that learning how search engines crawl and find content can be useful to SEOs.

I'm sure learning how information retrieval algorithms work will be useful, even if it's not used 1:1 in the same way. Go for it!

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 5, 2019

So go ahead and study up!

Forum discussion at Twitter.