5件你不了解的关于Google的事
（本文是且仅是个人观点）
坦白的说，我有点担心Saul Hansell，纽约时报的一个记者，他曾参加过我们Google的一些机密的质量研究会议。因为有一个记者坐在会议室内，我不太敢谈论评估方法和一些机密项目，甚至还有些紧张，虽然所有的内容都不入案。不过你现在可以对他的报道进行阅读了，至少从我的观点看来，他对Google的搜索质量的报道很符合实际。
让一个记者参加质量会议的冒险是值得的。原因就是下面的五点，这些你可能还不太了解。
Google仍然在搜索上保持高关注
我总是能听到有人说“Google对搜索不再关注……”或者“如果Google不再关注搜索时……”等等这样的流言。其实他们的担心是多余的，不过我还是来解释一下为什么人们会有这种担心。
像街景视图（street view）这样的产品肯定是色彩斑斓的、易于理解的，所以这种产品的发布总是能获得更多的大众宣传的。而且对编辑来说，介绍新产品的特性显然比报道Google在网页语义理解上或者文件打分系统上的进展要简单的多。顺便说一下，我很喜欢街景视图，Google Gears和手机日历（mobile Calendar）。
我们不经常对核心搜索质量做长篇大论般的讨论。有部分原因是一些记者不愿意对看不见的改变进行报道（“Google的搜索在泰国市场进行了调整和优化。虽然看不见，但它确实调整了！”）。
有些时候核心搜索很难让其他人感到兴奋——这有点像你很难让一张工作在计算机前的人的图片看起来很令人兴奋一样。另外，在商业模式里，我们不可能希望给竞争者任何有价值的暗示。
那么如果把这两种产品的信息放在一起会是什么情况呢？人们很喜欢Google提供的覆盖型媒体信息，但是他们将不会对核心搜索质量的文章感兴趣。所以，这时记者们做出了一个看似合理的推断：Google正在减少它对搜索的关注。这当然是不对的，成百上千的工程师每天都在一丝不苟的研究搜索质量。Google就是从搜索这个实用性上成长起来的，我们是不会放弃这种本性的。其实人们得出这种结论很正常。本文将通过对我们的工程师媒体的搜索质量工作的报道澄清误解。
Google做了了很多人们不曾留意过的改进
一些人认为，Google每个月的自我更新升级量不大。至少在搜索质量上，看起来每周的更改不大。其实这从Hansell的文章中可以看到：“搜索质量团队每周大约会进行6次主要、次要的更改，这些更改发生在驱动搜索引擎的浩瀚的数学方程式中。”
确保搜索结果的正确性难于登天
引自John Battelle：“人们贯来认为Google是搜索的黄金标准，而Google的秘诀就是不断整合所有搜索引擎的优势。他们为此做了1，000处小的更改。”
以我的经验来看，John说的没错。运行Google这样一个引擎巨擘，意味着你必须保证大大小小的事情都作对。一丁点疏忽都可能给用户带来麻烦，然后你就别想他们再用你的搜索了。我不会承诺我们能把所以的事情都做好，但是我们会努力达到这点。去年我在别的搜索引擎上读到了一段文章。他们彻底的说道“搜索引擎领域的秘密已经所剩无几了”。为此我高兴了好几天。
Google有一些很好的内部工具
这是我知道的我们第一次提到了内部调试工具。当你一天接收到了几亿个搜索询问时，你不可避免的会不完满的回复了一些询问。在Google，我们很乐意听到这样的询问，因为我们能对它们进行剖析、优化我们的爬虫。
Google背后有很多默默无闻的人在优化搜索
我想这点必须替Googler们交代清除。当Seo们告诉我一些爬虫的更改建议时，大多数情况下我会将问题提交给爬虫团队的专家们，他们才是真正处理这些问题的人。
所以文章里提到这些没有被提及过的人我很高兴。比如说Amit Singhal，一个有趣的人，也是对Google影响很大的人。这篇新闻报道同时也刊登了朱建飞的照片。建飞是我的一个同事，他在中文垃圾处理团队；建飞最近也在中国SES大会上发言并做了题为《SEO和中文搜索》的采访。
最重要的是，这篇新闻稿所提到的，我们有成百上千的工程师正密切关注着Google的搜索和质量。正是这些成天和国际事件打交道的人为我们评估着个人用户搜索和索引的质量，同时也为达到一个新的质量标准而不断修正bug。（更别说其他Google搜索之外的工作人员了。）我知道Saul Hansell还与其他的几位工程师交谈过，所以我相信不久之后关于Googler的报道会更多。
综上所述，阅读完本文，您才了解到了原本不知道的5件Google搜索引擎的事。
·仅仅因为Google不经常谈论搜索、记者也不经常报道核心搜索，是不能乱加评论的。Google在众多方面倾入了大量的人力、物力用以研究和改善搜索引擎。
·Google每个星期都有做出质量标准的改变。
·如果你真心的想做好搜索引擎，那就必须把每件事做好。
·Google通过多种途径优先处理反馈和工具以研究改善搜索引擎的办法。
·我很高兴我们正在报道那些默默无闻的人，并且我们应该扩大报道范围。很多人在为改良用户体验而做出贡献。
Matt Cutts
2007-6-4
June 4, 2007 @ 12:24 am · Filed under Google/SEO
(This is all my personal opinion.)
To be completely honest, I was a little worried about Saul Hansell, a journalist for the New York Times, sitting in on some of our confidential quality meetings at Google. Even though everything was off-the-record, you can’t help but be slightly nervous talking about evaluation methodologies and confidential projects with a reporter in the room. You can read the article now, and in my opinion it does a good job of describing search quality at Google.
I think it was worth the risk of letting a journalist attend our quality meetings. To see why, I’ll highlight five things from the article that you might not have known:
Google continues to have a strong focus on search
All the time I hear things like “If Google doesn’t pay attention to search…” or “If Google loses its focus on search.” That’s not likely to happen, but let me explain why people might worry that Google will lose our focus on search.
- Something like Street View is splashy, cool, and easy to understand, so launches like that tend to get more coverage. It’s much easier for someone to write about a new product or feature than about how Google has improved its semantic understanding of the web, or when we get better at scoring documents. I love Street view, Google Gears, and mobile Calendar, by the way. I’m just using them as examples because they’re easy to understand and recent.
- We don’t always talk a ton about core search quality. Part of the reason is that some reporters are less interested in changes that can’t even be seen (”Google’s search just got a little better in Thai. You can’t see it, but it did!”). Sometimes core search is hard to get other people excited about — kinda like it’s hard to make a picture of someone working on a computer exciting. And sometimes as a business you don’t want to give hints to competitors about how you do things. I’ve got a funny story about “url.host” that I’ll tell someday. Maybe someone will ask me about it in the Q&A tomorrow at the conference.
- We don’t always talk a ton about core search quality. Part of the reason is that some reporters are less interested in changes that can’t even be seen (”Google’s search just got a little better in Thai. You can’t see it, but it did!”). Sometimes core search is hard to get other people excited about — kinda like it’s hard to make a picture of someone working on a computer exciting. And sometimes as a business you don’t want to give hints to competitors about how you do things. I’ve got a funny story about “url.host” that I’ll tell someday. Maybe someone will ask me about it in the Q&A tomorrow at the conference.
What happens when you put these two trends together? People see media coverage on neat/wild/fun things that Google does, and they don’t read many stories about core search quality. From those two facts, they extrapolate to what seems like a reasonable conclusion: Google is focusing less on search. But that’s just not true. Hundreds of engineers pay attention to our search quality in ways big and small. Google is practically designed from the ground up so that we can’t lose that search focus. It’s natural to combine these two trends and come to the wrong conclusion. By giving a glimpse at what our search quality engineers do on a daily basis, this article dispels that misconception.
Google makes lots of improvements that most people never notice.
Some people think that Google changes a few things every few months. At least in search quality, it’s more like a few things every week. From the article: “the search-quality team makes about a half-dozen major and minor changes a week to the vast nest of mathematical formulas that power the search engine.” I don’t think we’ve discussed our pace of search quality changes before.
Getting search right is really hard
The article quotes John Battelle:
“People still think that Google is the gold standard of search,” Mr. Battelle says. “Their secret sauce is how these guys are doing it all in aggregate. There are 1,000 little tunings they do.”
In my experience that’s correct. Running a search engine at Google-scale means that you have to get lots of big things and hundreds of little things right. Missing even a few of those things will annoy users (sometimes subconsciously) and they won’t use your search engine as much. I would never claim that we get all of those hundreds of things right ourselves, but we try to. I read a quote from someone from a different search engine last year. They essentially said that “there was no more secret sauce left” in search. After reading that claim, I walked around happy for days.
Google has some good internal tools
This article was the first time that I know of that we’ve mentioned our internal debug tools. When you get hundreds of millions of queries a day, it’s inevitable that some queries won’t return the ideal set of results. At Google, we love hearing about those queries because we can dissect them and plan how to improve our algorithms.
There are a lot of people “behind the curtain” at Google that improve search
I think it’s important to get more Googlers out into the spotlight. Sometimes search engine optimizers attribute (say) some crawl change to me when the most I might have done was relay a problem report to the experts in the crawl/index team, who then do the real work of deciding how to tackle an issue and implementing that idea.
So I’m glad that the article sheds light on some new people in search. The article discusses Amit Singhal, who is a wonderful guy and a strong influence at Google. The newspaper article also includes a picture of Jianfei Zhu. Jianfei is a colleague that works with me and others on Chinese webspam; Jianfei also spoke at SES China recently and has done interviews about SEO and Chinese search.
Most importantly, the article mentions that there are hundreds of engineers that pay attention to search and quality at Google. These are phenomenal people who work on everything from international issues to evaluating our quality to crawling/indexing to personalization to fixing bugs to new quality initiatives. (Not to mention all the other people who make a difference at Google in hundreds of ways outside of search.) I know that Saul Hansell talked to several other engineers when he visited Google, so over time I believe we’ll get even more Googlers out into the spotlight.
So, five things you might not have known about Google’s search until you read this article:
- Just because Google doesn’t always talk about search and journalists don’t always write about core search doesn’t mean stuff isn’t happening. Google devotes a ton of effort to improving our search in many different ways.
- Google makes a go/no-go decision on several different quality changes each week.
- If you want to build search loyalty, you have to get a lot of different things right.
- Google has many ways to prioritize feedback and tools to look at how to improve search.
- I’m glad we’re shedding light on some additional people at Google. Many people work behind the scenes to improve the user experience at Google, and we should look to highlight even more of those people
- Just because Google doesn’t always talk about search and journalists don’t always write about core search doesn’t mean stuff isn’t happening. Google devotes a ton of effort to improving our search in many different ways.
- Google makes a go/no-go decision on several different quality changes each week.
- If you want to build search loyalty, you have to get a lot of different things right.
- Google has many ways to prioritize feedback and tools to look at how to improve search.
- I’m glad we’re shedding light on some additional people at Google. Many people work behind the scenes to improve the user experience at Google, and we should look to highlight even more of those people
（翻译：Skywalker 编辑：Levi）
原载: 蓝杉seo团队博客
版权所有，转载时必须以链接形式注明作者和原始出处及本声明。
原载: 蓝杉seo团队博客
版权所有，转载时必须以链接形式注明作者和原始出处及本声明。
