Google School Lesson No. 2: Technologies behind Google Ranking

It's back to school again with the second lesson in Google ranking: Technologies behind Google ranking.

As we mentioned last week, Amit from Google had promised to continue feeding us with more information about Google ranking and he hasn't let us down. This time he has explained more about the technology behind the Google ranking system.

Here are some of the main points to note:

• The core technology in the Google ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR).
• To understand pages Google has crawl and indexing system technology.
• Google tries to associate concepts to pages, even if those concepts aren't clear from the language on the page.
• Google makes a distinction between "important and less important words in the page."
• Google also looks at the "freshness of the information on the page."
• Google has a spelling suggestion system and an advanced synonyms system so it knows exactly what your search query means.
• Google uses localization systems (geo-location) to give "the best locally relevant results served globally".
• Google's latest advancement in search technology is a translation system called Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), which "allows users to first discover information that is not in their language, and then using Google's translation technology, we make this information accessible."

If you would like to read the article in full, then click here.

Google understands that search habits are constantly changing. In the last decade search has moved from "give me what I said to give me what I want" and it is great to see that Google is on the front foot in making search for us as easy as possible- guess that's why they are number one!

Posted by Courtney Mills at 12:48 AM GMT