Key factors that help determine which results are returned for your query on Google:
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/algorithms/
I have always wondered how Google’s search engine works. With billions of webpages on the internet, how does Google’s search algorithm work? How does it rank all the relevant webpages on the internet? It wasn’t until our first lecture on PageRank that I finally started to understand how Google’s search algorithm works. As stated in the source, Google’s ranking system is designed to “sort through hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second, and present them in a way that helps you find what you’re looking for”.
So, what are the key factors that help determine which results are returned for your query? The first factor is the “meaning of your query”. This establishes what information you’re looking for. The second factor is the “relevance of webpages”. This assess whether the page contains information that is relevant to what you’re searching for. The third factor is the “quality of content”. This aims to prioritize the most reliable sources available. For example, if other prominent websites link to the page (what is known as PageRank), that has proven to be a good sign that the information is well trusted. Google would carry out some PageRank calculations, like that seen in class. A page can have a high PageRank if there are many pages that point to it, or if there are some pages that point to it and have a high PageRank. Intuitively, pages that are well cited from many places around the web are worth looking at. The fourth factor is “usability of webpages”. This evaluates whether webpages are easy to use. For example, this analyzes whether the site appears correctly in different browsers. The fifth factor is “context and settings”. Information such as your location, past search history and search settings all help to tailor your results to what is most useful and relevant for you in that moment. Google uses all these five key factors to help determine which results are returned for your query. These factors help Google decide which webpage is better than another for your specific query.
As we can see, some of the factors Google uses to determine which results are returned for a query relate back to topics covered in class, specifically our discussion on PageRank. In lecture and in Chapter 14: “Link Analysis and Web Search” of Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World By David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, we discuss PageRank. Specifically, we learn about an idea of “endorsement” in the fact of passing directly from “one prominent page to another”; in other words, a page is important if it is cited by other important pages. And that this is the mode of endorsement that forms the basis for the PageRank measure of importance. As seen in the source, Google believes that this is one key factors in determining the results of a query, as they also carry out PageRank calculations because it has been proven to be a good sign that the information is well trusted. The calculations Google uses are very similar to that seen in class. It is very interesting to see how the same thought process from class can still be applied to the real world. And how it is used in conjunction with other webpage qualities to decide the end results of a query.