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A recent post on the Google Blog by the CEO, Udi Manber, made an interesting read. The post entitled ‘Introduction to Google Quality Search’ takes a look at the many different teams within Google and gives a little insight into the role they play. He touches on bigger issues affecting Google such as PageRank or the recent algorithm update as well as smaller issues such as fixes for Hebrew acronyms and advances in language queries.

After reading the article it made me appreciate the size of the task that Google face on a daily basis. The web is moving at an unprecedented rate and being able to cope with the ever changing and more complex search queries, analysis them and return the most relevant results from the library of billions of pages is mind boggling. (more…)

Recently, I’ve been reading a few articles regarding an algorithm change that Google has implemented and about the way it handles subdomains and subdirectories. This reported change seems to have got many people worried that their subdomains would be removed from the search engine results, but today Google’s Matt Cutts posted an article clarifying the situation on this matter. (more…)

This weekend has seen Google roll out and make public its latest page rank information. This update has been a long awaited event and as with the majority of Google updates has caused quite a stir among the web community and particularly with those working in the field of search engine optimisation.

This David and Goliath update has seen many long established, big name, high ranking websites such as Apple, Microsoft and IBM take a drop in page rank, in some cases from PR10 to PR6 or PR7, while other smaller websites have seen the expected boost in their page rank score.

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Last week , some of my work colleagues and I, were playing about with the new flight simulator application hidden within Google Earth. We got talking about the famous adventurer Steve Fossett, who recently went missing on the 3rd September while flying his single-engine Citabria aircraft from an airfield in Yerington, Nevada and how Google Earth could be used to try and locate Steve Fossett or any possible crash site. After all, many eyes must be far better than just a few. Google Earth would offer the potential to search a larger area faster than in an aircraft.

So today I was pleased to read several articles about how Google Earth’s technology is providing help in the hunt for Steve Fossett and how Amazons search scheme ‘Mechanical Turk’ is aiming to focus searchers efforts by using new satellite imagery of Nevada. (more…)