google search It is often referred to as the gateway to the Internet; it’s the first stop on most people’s journey to online information. However, Google doesn’t say much about how it organizes the Internet, making Search a giant black box that dictates what we know and what we don’t. This week, a leak of 2,500 pages was first reported by the search engine optimization (SEO) veteran Rand Fishkingave the world a glimpse into the mystery of Google Search 26 years ago.
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“I think the most important thing is that what Google’s public representatives say and what Google’s search engine does are two different things,” Fishkin said in a statement emailed to Gizmodo.
These documents provide a more detailed look at how Google Search controls the information we consume. Bringing the right web page to your computer is not a passive task, as thousands of editorial decisions are made on your behalf by a secret group of Googlers. For SEO, an industry that lives and dies by Google’s algorithms, the leaked documents are an earthquake. It’s like the NFL refs rewrote the rules of football midway through the season, and you just found out while the Super Bowl is playing.
Several SEO experts tell Gizmodo that the leak lists 14,000 ranking functions that, at a minimum, define how Google organizes everything on the web. Some of these factors include Google’s determination of a website’s authority on a given topic, the size of the website, or the number of clicks a website receives. Google has previously denied that it uses some of these ranking features in Search, but the company has confirmed that these documents are real, albeit, in its explanation, imperfect.
“We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo. “We have shared extensive information about how search works and the types of factors that weigh our systems, while working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.”
As for Google’s “caution,” the company won’t confirm what is or isn’t correct about these documents. Google says it’s wrong to assume this is full information about the search, and tells Gizmodo that giving away too much information could allow bad actors. Ultimately, we don’t know what goes into determining these factors, or how much weight Google Search gives to each, if any.
“We’re just looking at different variables that they’re considering,” said Mike King, an SEO expert who was one of the first to analyze the leak, in an interview with Gizmodo. “That’s the granularity of it [Google] check out the websites.”
This leak was first noticed by Erfan Azimi, an SEO professional who found the API documentation publicly available on GitHub. It is unclear whether these documents were actually “leaked” or somehow published by Google in a quiet corner of the web, perhaps by accident. Azimi intended to publicize those documents by taking them to Fishkin last week, who asked King to help make sense of them.
King notes that a ranking function “homepagePagerankNs” suggests that the prominence of a website’s homepage could underpin everything you post. Fishkin writes the leak refers to a system called NavBoost, first referenced by Google search vice president Pandu Nayak in his Justice Department testimony, which allegedly measure clicks to increase your Google Search ranking. Many in the SEO industry take these documents as confirmation of what the industry has long suspected: a website considered popular by Google may receive a higher search ranking for a query, while a lesser-known site may have better information.
In recent months, several small publishers have done so have seen their Google Search traffic disappear. When The Verge’s Nilay Patel asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai last week, Pichai said that he it was not clear “if this is a uniform trend.A ranking feature that King calls out seems to rank these small sites evenly.
“They have a function there called ‘smallPersonalSite’ and we don’t know how it’s used, of course, but this is an indication that [Google] is looking to understand if it’s smaller sites,” King said. “Because a lot of these small sites are being crushed right now, it just shows [Google] it’s not doing anything to compensate for what these big brand signals are.”
Notably, Pichai later mentioned in that interview with The Verge that, on other occasions, Google has pushed more traffic to small sites. These ranking features could indicate the levers that Google can pull. As more and more national media organizations license their content to appear on ChatGPT, Google Search also appears to be tilting toward larger publishers. Broadly speaking, this could have a crushing effect, compressing what most people hear only in mainstream media organizations.
The ripple effects of these leaked Google documents were widely felt. Kristen Ruby, CEO of Ruby Media Group who has worked in digital PR and SEO for over 15 years, tells Gizmodo that she received a ominous text Monday night: “Shit will fall on Google tomorrow.”
Ruby quickly found the leak and pointed to two classification features that stood out to her: “isElectionAuthority” and “isCovidLocalAuthority”. These features appear to be Google’s way of ranking a web page’s credibility to provide relevant information about the election and COVID-19, respectively. In 2019, Ruby wrote extensively about how Google measures reliable web pages (which Google refers to as EAT, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust) is inherently political. She notes that Google’s measurement of these factors tends to skew along political lines.
“It is problematic to me that Google does not provide context on critical elements of the data such as ‘isElectionAuthority’ or ‘isCovidLocalAuthority’. How does Google define an authority in these critical domains?” Ruby said in an emailed statement. “I shouldn’t have to guess what the answer is. Google should be around and tell me what the answer is.”
Although Google is a company, with a right to private information, Ruby argues that Google has an obligation to answer questions about these classification functions that shape the world around us. King and Fishkin also noticed “isCovidLocalAuthority” and “isElectionAuthority” in their writings on the leak, both pointing to the importance of search engines in elevating quality information.
“I think it’s really important that they provide that kind of discernment for information because like it or not, Google is effectively a public service,” King said. “I’m probably going to hate to say this, but we think it’s the main source of how we get information on the web.”
The way Google ranks information in these examples is a microcosm of the entire search ecosystem. Every day, there are millions of questions about what information to amplify and what to silence. While Google and various tech companies have long tried to paint themselves as opinion-free algorithms, these ranking features show that’s not exactly the case. There are many more examples of ranking features revealed in the 2,500-page leak.
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Since Google won’t delve into these documents, telling Gizmodo that giving away too much information could allow bad actors, it’s up to SEO experts to make sense of it on behalf of everyone who uses Google Search. Some of those 14,000 ranking features identified in the last week are things Google explicitly stated it hasn’t used over the years.
In a 2016 video, a Google Search representative stated, “We does not have a website authority score.“In a 2015 interview, another Googler said:”Using clicks directly in ranking would be a mistake.It’s hard to make sense of these comments now in light of the leaked documents and Google’s response.
“This response is a perfect example of why people don’t like or trust Google,” Fishkin said. “It’s a non-statement that doesn’t address the leak, adds no value, and could have been written by an AI trained in the most soulless corporate messaging of the last decade.”
In the age of AI responses, Ruby notes that the way Google ranks web pages is more important than ever. Instead of a series of links to various prospects, you might just get a straight answer thanks to Google’s new AI overviews. However, we’ve seen Reddit posts from 10 years ago get strange amounts of authority, telling some users that glue on your pizza. How Google chooses authority is becoming increasingly important, as the top result may be the only one with a voice now.
“We’re shifting gears. We’re moving from one search system to another,” Ruby said. “AI is impacting search results in profound ways.”
Ultimately, it’s hard to say what Google is actually doing with these ranking features. What is clear is that Google created these classifiers, and potentially has even more, to classify websites on the Internet. These rankings clearly require judgment calls, adding further evidence that Google Search is not an objective experience, but a series of editorial choices made by people at Google.
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