Google’s Gary Illyes released a new How Search Works video that gave an inside look at how search queries are interpreted and classified. Gary’s presentation outlines the ranking process that every SEO should know and understand.
Objective of the classification
Gary begins the presentation by emphasizing that the goal of search is to provide results with high-quality, reliable, and relevant web pages.
Later in the video, he refines the meaning of the word relevance by emphasizing user relevance, which is different from simple semantic relevance. The relevance for the user can mean personalization which can be previous searches, topicality and geolocation. I use the word topical in the sense of a topical query, as in trending interest.
Much SEO is focused on the semantic meaning of words, but another way of thinking about relevance is in relation to the user, which can encompass many factors.
Analysis of search queries
Gary then moves on to the first step of how Google ranks web pages, which is interpreting the search query, which starts with cleaning up the search query by removing narrow words, identifying entities that need narrow words, and expanding the query .
Stop words are words like “and”, “in”, “is”, “on” and “the” that are removed from search queries because they appear frequently and do not add anything meaningful to what the user In general, there is also a practical reason to remove stop words, as it reduces database bloat and their absence improves processing time.
Gary Illyes mentioned that some sentences need parallel words, so these should also be considered, using the example of the Statue of Liberty, where the word “of” is important to the meaning.
Expansion of queries
This is the part where search queries are combined with other similar queries, using the example of “car dealer” which is the same as “car dealer”, which means that a web page about a qualify for inquiries about the other although the sentence does not. does not appear on the web page.
Once the query is understood, the parsed query is sent to the index for classification
classification
Gary says that a large number of matching web pages are submitted to the index for ranking.
Mention the following considerations:
Relevance to the user Hundreds of factors determine relevance The content of the web page is the most important factor Other factors include the user’s location, language and device type The quality of the web page and site are taken into account for classification. Internet search functions are query dependent
Relevance to the user
Gary mentions that the ranking “depends heavily on the relevance of the results to the user,” which is a deceptively simple statement that carries a lot of meaning. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of SEO focuses on semantic relevance, but the user relevance part is very important because search queries have multiple meanings and contexts that go beyond semantic relevance. Gary’s presentation mentions these other ways of understanding user relevance.
The important points he mentions are:
“Swarms of factors determine the relevance…
… the actual content of the page is the most important,”
…the user’s location, language and device type”
This is not a complete list, but it shows how determining relevancy is more complex than anchor text, entity analysis, user intent analysis, and semantic keyword SEO.
Quality of pages and websites
It is interesting that Gary chose to emphasize the uniqueness of the content not only as a quality factor but as an important factor. Many SEOs interpret the word “uniqueness” literally to mean a word-for-word duplication of other content. But unique has another meaning in the sense that something is different from other things as a whole.
I see SEOs list the things they do to create high-ranking content and it makes me cringe when they include “competitor analysis” as part of that process because that’s the first step in creating content similar to what’s already out there in the search results, based on the idea that this is what Google ranks, so let’s give Google more. The resulting content can be the exact opposite of what Google is looking for and not at all, resulting in a “discovered not indexed” designation in the search console.
Uniqueness is something that Googlers have emphasized for decades, and it requires deep thought.
Search functions
Google displays many different types of search functions, and Gary Illyes says that they are query-dependent, meaning that different queries trigger different functions.
He said:
“Depending on the user’s query, the search features that appear on the search results pages may also change.”
Takeaway food
Gary covered so many topics in one bite-sized video that belies the importance of the information shared there.
Watch Gary’s presentation:
How Google Search serves pages
Featured image a screenshot from Google video/modified by author
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