"In 2003, Google introduced a "supplemental index" as a way of showing
more documents to users. Most webmasters will probably snicker about
that statement, since supplemental docs were famous for refreshing
less often and showing up in search results less often. But the
supplemental index served an important purpose: it stored unusual
documents that we would search in more depth for harder or more
esoteric queries. For a long time, the alternative was to simply not
show those documents at all, but this was always unsatisfying--ideally,
we would search all of the documents all of the time, to give users
the experience they expect.
This led to a major effort to rethink the entire supplemental index.
We improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a
document was stored in, and once these "supplementalization effects"
were gone, the "supplemental result" tag itself--which only served to
suggest that otherwise good documents were somehow suspect--was
eliminated a few months ago. Now we're coming to the next major
milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between
indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth
for obscure queries, we're now searching the whole index for every
query.
From a user perspective, this means that you'll be seeing more
relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for
non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality
pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up
for queries.
Hidden behind this are some truly amazing technical feats; serving
this much larger of an index doesn't happen easily, and it took
several fundamental innovations to make it possible. At this point
it's safe to say that the Google search engine works like nothing else
in the world. If you want to know how it actually works, you'll have
to come join Google Engineering; as usual, it's all triple-hush-hush
secrets.*
* Originally, I was going to give the stock Google answer, "If I told
you, I'd have to kill you." However, I've been informed by management
that killing people violates our "Don't be evil" policy, so I'm forced
to replace that with sounding mysterious and suggesting that good
engineers come and join us. Which I'm dead serious about; if you've
got the technical chops and want to work on some of the most complex
and advanced large-scale software infrastructure in the world, we want
you here.
> Interesting (for me at any rate!) that Yonaton Zunger post is labelled
> as
> "Posted by Yonatan Zunger, Search Quantity Team"
> I'd like to know more about the different roles, emphases, priorities
> of the "Search Quantity Team" compared with those of the "Search
> Quality Team".
Now, I'm probably alone on this one; but what the hell, eh?
Me and the guys stopped worrying about the whole 'this much of my site
is in 'Supplemental Hell' thing a while back.
Instead, we've been concentrating on working in the most balanced way
possible and worrying about what the end-user gets, rather than what
the engines want.**
So far [and this also seems to hold true for clients' sites], this
strategy has achieved far better results than I've seen from many SEOs
using their 'masonic knowledge' to try and get ranked in the same
sectors we're covering...
Consequently, I cannot help but think that [for the industry as a
whole] far too much effort in recent times has gone into worrying
about the 'Supplemental Boogeyman', or overcooking a site's SEO score+
+, and not enough into worrying about giving visitors what they
actually want...
Maybe the old saw from that Kevin Costner film's right...
"If you build it, they will come."
**Based on the old 'Let's pretend Google doesn't exist' comment from
way back.
++ I think that by now, most of the regulars here know what a special
place in my heart 'Yahoo SEOs' [the search... hell, you know that too,
don't you?] hold.
In any case, I'm with Robbo.
I want to know how the difference between 'Quality' and 'Quantity' is
seen by Google. ;-)
> In any case, I'm with Robbo.
> I want to know how the difference between 'Quality' and 'Quantity' is
> seen by Google. ;-)
Howdy,
If you go back in history near the beginning of Google, they bought
out one of the huge archives of Usenet Newsgroups. Then they
scrounged all of the world to build a 20 year history of every message
they could find.
That need to have huge volumes of data still exists. Quality seems to
be an after thought and has yet to start trimming out the massive
amounts of junk nobody wants to look at.
On top of that, computers are very happy to handle quantity. However,
"quality" is a word that does not apply to software. It can only
count numbers. Bigger numbers do not equate to "quality". Only
trained people can start determining quality.
I will give Google credit for trying to do everything they can to get
what people want to look at on top of search lists. It's an almost
impossible task to do it with software programming unless you can
afford Neural Network computers and very expensive programmers.
AFAIK that title was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, since Yonatan's post
was about the quantity of results stored in this-or-that index. Though
I suppose, as they say, quantity has a quality all its own. ;-)
