Google Explains Objectivity
December 15, 2010
Fast Company ran an interesting, but terse, article “Top Google Engineer.” The article addresses the issue of objectivity in Google search results. Some companies feel that Google is delivering less than objective search results. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
“What we do at Google and what we’ve done for years is to not inject any subjectivity into these algorithms,” says Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and head of the company’s search quality, ranking, and algorithm team. “We didn’t want to introduce any bias into the mathematical modeling—our modeling is predicting, given a letter, what’s the probability of completion.”
Questions that crossed my mind upon reading the Fast Company article were:
- What is the role of hit boosting in the administrative components of the search algorithms?
- What administrative (human or algorithmic) interactions take place for results from large advertisers, partners, or internal Google units; for example, Google Apps or Google Local special advertising offers?
- What “supervisor” or “library look up” functions operate to place certain content in certain regions of a display page; for example, ads at the top and the side of a page or in other displays such as video?
- What is the numerical recipe for filling the various containers on a custom Google page; for example, Google.com/ig? Are humans involved in setting or tweaking threshold settings for page displays?
I understand the point about algorithms. I am curious about the supervisory functions performed by other algorithms and the Google engineers responsible for certain operations. I don’t have the answers to these questions, and I don’t think the recent articles about search result objectivity shine much light into the dark corners of search and page display administration (particularly the role of human engineers), and code “janitors” ( a term used in a Google patent document), and supervisory operations for results page assembly.
Stephen E Arnold, December 15, 2010
Freebie
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
