In Depth October 1, 2009, 5:00PM EST

Can Google Stay on Top of the Web?

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Google's top troubleshooters (l-r): anti-spammer Cutts; Singhal, head of rankings; and Huffman, who runs the "eval" unit Illustration by Alex Robbins

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FASTER THAN AN EYEBLINK

That experiment points up another surprising aspect of Google's testing. Google is famous for its algorithms and data-driven approach, but the company depends nearly as much on a global network of human evaluators, or "raters." These part-time contract workers are asked to provide opinions on proposed changes and whether results are more relevant, among other things. Often their opinions carry the day. A couple of years ago, an engineer proposed that Google extract addresses from pages and display them, and perhaps a related map, in appropriate situations, such as when someone does a search for "MOMA New York." The raters liked it, and after a live test on Google confirmed its popularity, the feature was rolled out. About 10 changes are approved to go live at each Thursday morning launch meeting.

To an outsider, many of the changes may look impossibly trivial. Several years ago, for instance, engineers noticed that while Google was returning useful pages when someone typed an acronym such as "CIA"—providing links to the government agency and to the Culinary Institute of America—people were taking a slightly longer time than expected to click on one of them. So on the results pages, Google began highlighting in bold the full names. Immediately, Google saw more clicks through to pages—and faster, too. How much faster? Perhaps 30 or 40 thousandths of a second, on average, Singhal says. That's one tenth the speed of an eyeblink. "This was a small idea," concedes Singhal. "But we have a real responsibility as a company to respect people's time."

More recently, Google has been focusing on providing results more relevant to specific regions around the world. Engineers realized that people in India searching for "bank" didn't much care about Bank of America (BAC), even if it was in the news. So Google has been tweaking algorithms to emphasize the searcher's apparent location. Now, a search on "bank" on the U.S. site, google.com, will bring up links to Bank of America and Wells Fargo (WFC), while the same search on google.co.in, Google's Indian site, will bring up homegrown HDFC Bank (HDB) and ICICI Bank (IBN). It's one small reason Google has even higher market share in many other countries than in the U.S.—such as 88% in India, according to comScore (SCOR).

Making all these search improvement efforts even more difficult is the need to cull Web spam. Marketers of male enhancement drugs or purveyors of damaging software, for instance, are continually trying to fool Google's algorithms into ranking their pages up high. Cutts and his team are constantly on the lookout for ways to recognize them and squelch their appearance in results. In other cases, Webmasters who oversee sites run afoul of such efforts by accident. So Cutts, a voluble 37-year-old who currently sports a shaved head—the result of a lost bet that his team couldn't finish a project on a tight deadline—also educates Webmasters through conference appearances and informational videos on YouTube.