Google Search Quality

Late yesterday, Udi Manber, VP of Engineering for Search Quality over at Google offered up a post on the Official Google Blog titled - Introduction to Google Search Quality. What drew me in was this quote -

This blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past.

Having high hopes I read on, hoping for some insights into the (largely) black box that is search relevancy. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The post dedicated a fair amount of time to detailing just how hard the job of the Search Quality team is, and how every second they have to handle hundreds of queries, parsing billions of documents to pluck out and order the relative few. And how they have just milliseconds to do so. Some time was also spent on the structure of the group, internationalization efforts, and some past history.

That's all great, but it feels like a setup to me. Frankly, this post did nothing to "open up a bit more" and even reiterated the point of why they need to be so secretive -

We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse. Competition is pretty straightforward. No company wants to share its secret recipes with its competitors. As for abuse, if we make our ranking formulas too accessible, we make it easier for people to game the system. Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse.

So in one blog-breath Google tells us their opening the door a crack while at the same time applying a few more dead bolts. It smells of PR to me and not a genuine desire for transparency.

I was also surprised to see this item receive fairly sparse coverage around the blogs and news sites. I don't go crazy with my RSS subscriptions like lots of folks do, but I've got 40 or so relevant ones in Google Reader and I've only seen this bit from SearchEngineLand - and that's nothing more than a recap  without any commentary.

Perhaps I'm being too quick to judge. The post is, after all, labeled as the first in a series. So far, nothing has been revealed, but I'll be watching that spot in Google Reader closely over the next few weeks.

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