Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web, by Stephen Levy, Wired (Feb 22)
Ripper of an article about Google's work on its search algorithms over the years. Each year it puts in 100s of changes - this year 550 or so improvements.
Interesting points about competition.
+ Facebook (of course) - getting answers from friends.
+ Twitter - with chatter
+ Yelp (in the US) for finding restaurants etc
+ Bing - and its success (says Stephen Levy) in health, travel, and shopping (I've yet to see this).
The main value to the article for searchers is in the clear description of how Google search works - crawling the web, ranking using signals, the signals, analyzing words.
Pay particular attention to the explanation of what Google does with mike siwek lawyer mi
Posted by Gwen at February 24, 2010 01:39 AM