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Steven Levy, the tech reporter that most tech reporters look up to. He has interviewed legends of tech, has access to companies like Google and Apple more than others. He is a legend and when he called out Google's search algorithm for failing him and searchers yesterday, Google's Danny Sullivan noticed and went on the defensive.
Here is Steven's tweet:
Dear @google, your search engine over-rates freshness as a signal. Searching for key info on subject x, you get dozens of redundant results on a recent issue , and have to go pages before finding a much more important result from 2 or 3years back.
— Steven Levy (@StevenLevy) May 13, 2019
In short, Steven said Google's algorithm weighs freshness way to much in their ranking algorithm.
Danny Sullivan, now at Google, responds, saying you should check out our before: and after: search commands - they are new and shiny. But yea, we are interested in examples, can you share example queries of where we failed you in your search.
The before: and after: commands let you easily restrict dates within a range far faster than our previous option. You can easily just specific a year. Lots of details on them here: https://t.co/3C5HTljjnd
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 13, 2019
Thanks, Danny. In these cases I now ask for results more than a year ago, but that's a pain. Too ofen, Search now seems to think that if it's not recent, no one wants to hear about it. Will try to send you examples.
— Steven Levy (@StevenLevy) May 13, 2019
Dates are very hard for us to determine precisely. We recently provided fresh guidance to sites to help us, but this explains some of the many complications: https://t.co/LFjoZ7sHoJ
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 13, 2019
Let's see if this results in any changes in the Google search algorithm?
Oh, and if you are interested in that photo. It was Matt Cutts interviewing Steven Levy at Google about his book, In The Plex:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
