I work for Google Search. Apologies for this! It’s been fixed now and posted to our search status dashboard https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...
I absolutely don't think it's a laughing matter. I made a joke in the interview with the reporter as a kind of icebreaker (which clearly didn't seem to go well). But as I also explained after doing that, "I’m pretty…
It's because when I was interviewed, what I said was all speaking officially for Google. You can attribute anything there to the company directly. My blog post -- I wrote that on my own. No one from the Google…
I know it was a long post I made. But yes, I (and we) recognize people want the results better. I covered this at the end (along with some other parts): "That said, there’s room to improve. There always is. Search and…
I get this view. But as my post explains, I'd quit writing about search. I was done. There wasn't going to be more criticism (or praise or whatever) from me because I'd retired from writing about search. I didn't have…
I was on vacation when this came up, so playing some catch up. I work for Google Search. I've been very involved with the concerns raised about quoted searches last year, especially because they never stopped working.…
"They say that old content does actually affect a site in terms of it’s average ranking" -- We didn't say this. We said the exact opposite.
You're asking about freshness, not oldness. IE: we have systems that are designed to show fresh content, relatively speaking -- matter of days. It's not the same as "this article is from 2005 so it's old don't show it."…
No. I don't code. I'm not an engineer. That doesn't mean I can't communicate how Google Search works. And our systems do not calculate how much "old" content is on a site to determine if it is "fresh" enough to rank…
There is. Which is why I specifically talked only about writing for algorithmic systems. Machine learning systems are different, and not everyone fully understands how they work, only that they do and can be influenced.
I actually work for our search quality team, and my job is to foster two-way communication between the search quality team and those outside Google. When issues come up outside Google, I try to explain what's happened…
No. But it's also complicated, as Matt did thinks beyond web spam. Matt worked within the search quality team, and he communicated a lot from search quality to the outside world about how Search works. After Matt left,…
thanks, Ernie!
I'm the source. I officially work for Google. The account is verified by X. It's followed by the official Google account. It links to my personal account; my personal account links back to it. I'm quoted in the Gizmodo…
That Googler here. I do use Google! And yeah, I get sometimes people want older content and we show fresher content. We have systems designed to show fresher content when it seems warranted. You can imagine a lot of…
It's not from Google PR. It's from me. I'm the public liaison for Google Search. I work for our search quality team, not for our PR team. It's not worded in any way intended to be parsed. I mean, I guess people can do…
No one has demonstrated that simply removing content that's "old" means we think a site is "fresh" and therefore should do better. There are people who perhaps updated older content reasonably to keep it up-to-date and…
This is our guidance about how people should see themselves to create helpful content to succeed in Google Search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat... That includes self-assessment questions,…
We don't have a policy or any guidance saying to remove old content. That said, we absolutely recognize a responsibility to help creators understand how to succeed and what not to do in terms of Google Search. That's…
I work for our search quality team, directly reporting to the head of that team, to help explain how search works to people outside Google and bring concerns and feedback back into team so we can look at ways to…
"We've been diligently working to improve the results" was the response to the question of "Are the employees at Google working on Search aware of how bad search results have become in the past year or two?" I thought…
No one has demonstrated getting rid of "old" content somehow makes the rest of the site "fresh" and therefore ranks better. What's likely the case is that some people have updated content to make it more useful -- more…
We've been diligently working to improve the results through things like our helpful content system, and that work is continuing. You can read about some of it in a recent post here (and it also describes the…
I work for Google and do come into HN occasionally. See my profile and my comments here. I'd come more often if it were easier to know when there's something Google Search-related happening. There's no good "monitor HN…
The engineers at Google do know how our algorithmic systems work because they write them. And the engineers I work with at Google looking at the article about this found it strange anyone believes this. It's not our…
I work for Google Search. Apologies for this! It’s been fixed now and posted to our search status dashboard https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...
I absolutely don't think it's a laughing matter. I made a joke in the interview with the reporter as a kind of icebreaker (which clearly didn't seem to go well). But as I also explained after doing that, "I’m pretty…
It's because when I was interviewed, what I said was all speaking officially for Google. You can attribute anything there to the company directly. My blog post -- I wrote that on my own. No one from the Google…
I know it was a long post I made. But yes, I (and we) recognize people want the results better. I covered this at the end (along with some other parts): "That said, there’s room to improve. There always is. Search and…
I get this view. But as my post explains, I'd quit writing about search. I was done. There wasn't going to be more criticism (or praise or whatever) from me because I'd retired from writing about search. I didn't have…
I was on vacation when this came up, so playing some catch up. I work for Google Search. I've been very involved with the concerns raised about quoted searches last year, especially because they never stopped working.…
"They say that old content does actually affect a site in terms of it’s average ranking" -- We didn't say this. We said the exact opposite.
You're asking about freshness, not oldness. IE: we have systems that are designed to show fresh content, relatively speaking -- matter of days. It's not the same as "this article is from 2005 so it's old don't show it."…
No. I don't code. I'm not an engineer. That doesn't mean I can't communicate how Google Search works. And our systems do not calculate how much "old" content is on a site to determine if it is "fresh" enough to rank…
There is. Which is why I specifically talked only about writing for algorithmic systems. Machine learning systems are different, and not everyone fully understands how they work, only that they do and can be influenced.
I actually work for our search quality team, and my job is to foster two-way communication between the search quality team and those outside Google. When issues come up outside Google, I try to explain what's happened…
No. But it's also complicated, as Matt did thinks beyond web spam. Matt worked within the search quality team, and he communicated a lot from search quality to the outside world about how Search works. After Matt left,…
thanks, Ernie!
I'm the source. I officially work for Google. The account is verified by X. It's followed by the official Google account. It links to my personal account; my personal account links back to it. I'm quoted in the Gizmodo…
That Googler here. I do use Google! And yeah, I get sometimes people want older content and we show fresher content. We have systems designed to show fresher content when it seems warranted. You can imagine a lot of…
It's not from Google PR. It's from me. I'm the public liaison for Google Search. I work for our search quality team, not for our PR team. It's not worded in any way intended to be parsed. I mean, I guess people can do…
No one has demonstrated that simply removing content that's "old" means we think a site is "fresh" and therefore should do better. There are people who perhaps updated older content reasonably to keep it up-to-date and…
This is our guidance about how people should see themselves to create helpful content to succeed in Google Search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat... That includes self-assessment questions,…
We don't have a policy or any guidance saying to remove old content. That said, we absolutely recognize a responsibility to help creators understand how to succeed and what not to do in terms of Google Search. That's…
I work for our search quality team, directly reporting to the head of that team, to help explain how search works to people outside Google and bring concerns and feedback back into team so we can look at ways to…
"We've been diligently working to improve the results" was the response to the question of "Are the employees at Google working on Search aware of how bad search results have become in the past year or two?" I thought…
No one has demonstrated getting rid of "old" content somehow makes the rest of the site "fresh" and therefore ranks better. What's likely the case is that some people have updated content to make it more useful -- more…
We've been diligently working to improve the results through things like our helpful content system, and that work is continuing. You can read about some of it in a recent post here (and it also describes the…
I work for Google and do come into HN occasionally. See my profile and my comments here. I'd come more often if it were easier to know when there's something Google Search-related happening. There's no good "monitor HN…
The engineers at Google do know how our algorithmic systems work because they write them. And the engineers I work with at Google looking at the article about this found it strange anyone believes this. It's not our…