amit singhal::In this post, i want to tell you more about one of these: the core ranking team amit singhal

amit singhal::In this post, i want to tell you more about one of these: the core ranking team.
Let me introduce myself.
My name is amit singhal.
After spending a decade as an ir researcher, i came to google in 2000, and have worked on google ranking ever since.
Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query.
We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages.
The first one is obvious.
Given our passion for search, we absolutely want to make sure that every user query gets the most relevant results.
The second principle seems obvious.
We work very hard to keep our system simple without compromising on the quality of results.
This is an ongoing effort, and a worthy one.
We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change.
Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query.
This simple understandable system has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows.
In our view, the web is built by people.
You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages.
We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms.
The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater internet community, not manually by us.
We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well.
Subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.
The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm.
Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages.
Stay tuned for my followup post, where i will discuss in detail the technologies behind our ranking and show examples of several stateoftheart ranking techniques in action.