the statement about manual ranking is intentionally deceptive, “The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms” is of course true and well-documented however they have a large global manual review effort and to pretend that whatever scoring adjustments happen there do not equate with manual ranking changes is just insulting to my intelligence. This article was very disappointing to me when I read it, because in general I think in terms of transparency Google is way ahead of where it was 3 years ago, but i think competitive pressures and the war vs spam is going to roll some of that back. The recent embarrassing Google Trends attacks are the sort of thing that google will need to step on (although its been being spammed since it began - 4chan getting involved turns the volume up a great deal), and I think we’ll probably see some other windows painted black soon

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03google.html

“So Mr. Singhal fired up one of Google’s prized and closely guarded internal programs, called Debug, which shows how its computers evaluate each query and each Web page.”

Speaking to Aaron’s comment, in that same blog post, Amit points out the difference between a re-ranking by hand, and policy enforcement for things like webspam:

“I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).”

@Brian: The message delivered creates the impression. Too bad it needs explaining with your references. Even so explained, though, that “small number of other reasons” is where the money is for most of us. The “etc” is not as simple as it seems. The “clear written policies” are historically anything but clear. As for the Magical Tools, I might trust them (and you Googlers) better if there was some accountability for the imparting of intent that takes place either within those tools, or in their use.

In all honestly, if I as webmaster didn’t clearly see problems with they way Google’s use of its tools misinterprets my own intent and creates risk for me, I wouldn’t care. But nearly every time I listen to a Google rep describe the spam fighting “quality” processes at work over there, I cringe because I know for a fact specific situations and circumstances that are completely legitimate and yet would be misconstrued based on those descriptions. I also tend to have insights into how the same judgements can be gamed, as in “where there’s trust, there’s an exploit”.  Put 2 and 2 together and you get cheated, from both sides (by Google, and by your Google-gaming competitor). No argument from me that it’s tough being Google, but that’s why Google’s got all the money. Do better and I won’t care if you’re arrogant.

http://www.wolf-howl.com/google/google-loves-wikipedi/

To me that suggest something personal so is Google now seeing itself as something more than an impersonal search engine? Is Google now thinking that it has a personal relationship with each and every person who uses it?

And if it does think that it has a personal relationship with each user then what does that mean for websites and ranking in the future? What if Google took a personal dislike to your website or the website of a client?

I’ve got to admit that I was pre-coffee when I read that post yesterday so maybe I’m reading something into it that isn’t really there … but it did make me wonder.

Stuart

The value of a Google engineer just went up ten times in value with that simple statement.

Seriously, did Google make a huge change in their security policies? Last I checked, the engineers can only see snippets of the code in order to prevent situations where one engineer could blab about what the secret ingredients are.