NY Times behind the curtain at Google

June 3rd, 2007 • Posted by Bill Bice • Permalink

Google is important.

Businesses everywhere are getting more and more of their business from their online presence — even small local businesses, like say spas.

For example, 48% of Instant Gift Certificate sales on Spa Emergency started with a search on Google, compared with 11% from MSN and 4% from Yahoo. We rank better on Google and MSN than Yahoo, so it's not a perfect representation of each search engine's traffic. But it shows the importance of search engines, particularly Google.

Google's importance has started to make them the new Microsoft — the big evil, tech company that everyone loves to hate. Google is far from perfect and their motivations don't match your's terribly well. They want to provide their users with the best possible search results, while serving up all those ads that make them truckloads of money. From your perspective, you are always the most relevant search result. I completely understand your perspective — I share it, and we're always working hard on it.

But, that doesn't make the "Do no evil" company evil. They've just been super-successful and they now have an out-sized impact on all of us.

At lot of what I read in the mainstream press about search engines and particularly search engine optimization (SEO) misses the mark — often entirely. That's why I enjoyed reading the New York Times article Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine:

These days, Google seems to be doing everything, everywhere. It takes pictures of your house from outer space, copies rare Sanskrit books in India, charms its way onto Madison Avenue, picks fights with Hollywood and tries to undercut Microsoft’s software dominance.

The writer doesn't try to get technical (which probably helps with not missing the mark), but provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the philosophy that drives Google as it works to improve it's search engine results.

Here's a great example that hits home for what we care about, finding local businesses:

In 2005, Bill Brougher, a Google product manager, complained that typing the phrase “teak patio Palo Alto” didn’t return a local store called the Teak Patio. So Mr. Singhal fired up one of Google’s prized and closely guarded internal programs, called Debug, which shows how its computers evaluate each query and each Web page. He discovered that Theteakpatio.com did not show up because Google’s formulas were not giving enough importance to links from other sites about Palo Alto.

It was also a clue to a bigger problem. Finding local businesses is important to users, but Google often has to rely on only a handful of sites for clues about which businesses are best.

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