dannysullivan

I work for Google Search. Apologies for this! It’s been fixed now and posted to our search status dashboard https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...

I absolutely don't think it's a laughing matter. I made a joke in the interview with the reporter as a kind of icebreaker (which clearly didn't seem to go well).

But as I also explained after doing that, "I’m pretty sure, went into what I thought was a more serious and thoughtful discussion, at least from my perspective."

I don't think making a joke about something is the same as someone then thinking an entire matter isn't serious. But I can appreciate you disagree.

It's because when I was interviewed, what I said was all speaking officially for Google. You can attribute anything there to the company directly.

My blog post -- I wrote that on my own. No one from the Google communications team reviewed it, approved it, vetted it and so on. That's what I was trying to explain.

That doesn't mean, of course, people won't think it somehow reflects on Google or what I do there. It no doubt will. But that's not quite the same thing as something being an official company statement.

I know it was a long post I made. But yes, I (and we) recognize people want the results better. I covered this at the end (along with some other parts):

"That said, there’s room to improve. There always is. Search and content can move through cycles. You can have a rise in unhelpful content, and search systems evolve to deal with it. We’re in one of those cycles. I fully recognize people would like to see better search results on Google. I know how hard people within Google Search are working to do this. I’m fortunate to be a part of that. To the degree I can help — which includes better communicating, ensuring that I reflect the humbleness that we — and I feel — I’ll keep improving on myself."

I get this view. But as my post explains, I'd quit writing about search. I was done. There wasn't going to be more criticism (or praise or whatever) from me because I'd retired from writing about search. I didn't have plans to go to Google when I retired. No one there even knew I was leaving. Which ... you or anyone can choose to believe or not, but that's how it is.

I was far from the only critic (or advocate) for Google or other search engines. There are plenty of others. New people, and with good views, continue to come into the space. The idea of "Google hired me to quiet me," again, while I get it, just wouldn't resolve that.

By the way, nor would some alternative idea that I somehow had secret details of spamming techniques make sense, either. Google had and still has an excellent spam team. They didn't need me to come in and somehow fill gaps.

What Google gained by me coming in, I hope, is someone that both tries to help people better understand how the search engine works from within the search quality team (that's where I work, in that team) and also bring back into that team advocacy and feedback from the outside world (which typically, I realize, isn't that clear to those people outside Google -- here's an example I shared of this last week when asked: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1720491595420856329 )

I was on vacation when this came up, so playing some catch up. I work for Google Search. I've been very involved with the concerns raised about quoted searches last year, especially because they never stopped working. They do work.

We did make an update last year to better reflect where quoted content appears on a page in the snippets we show. We did this because sometimes it's hard to find the quoted material on the page itself, leading to the "quotes don't work" issues.

This post explains more about this: https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...

The post also explains things like how with punctuation, we'll ignore that -- which leads to the "example.com" type of issue you might be having. If you're quoting a domain name, we're likely seeing that as "name com" rather than a request to just search within the domain. If you want to just search within the domain, that's what site: is for such as [site:example.com whatever you want to search for]

"They say that old content does actually affect a site in terms of it’s average ranking" -- We didn't say this. We said the exact opposite.

You're asking about freshness, not oldness. IE: we have systems that are designed to show fresh content, relatively speaking -- matter of days. It's not the same as "this article is from 2005 so it's old don't show it." And it's also not what is being generally being discussed in getting rid of "old" content. And also, especially for sites publishing a lot of fresh content, we get that really fast already. It's essential part of how we gather news links, for example. And and and -- even with freshness, it's not "newest article ranks first" because we have systems that try to show the original "fresh" content or sometimes a slightly older piece is still more relevant. Here's a page that explains more ranking systems we have that deal with both original content and fresh content: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking...

No. I don't code. I'm not an engineer. That doesn't mean I can't communicate how Google Search works. And our systems do not calculate how much "old" content is on a site to determine if it is "fresh" enough to rank better. The engineers I work with reading about all this today find it strange anyone thinks this.

There is. Which is why I specifically talked only about writing for algorithmic systems. Machine learning systems are different, and not everyone fully understands how they work, only that they do and can be influenced.

I actually work for our search quality team, and my job is to foster two-way communication between the search quality team and those outside Google. When issues come up outside Google, I try to explain what's happened to the best I can. I bring feedback into the search quality team and Google Search generally to help foster potential improvements we can make.

No. But it's also complicated, as Matt did thinks beyond web spam. Matt worked within the search quality team, and he communicated a lot from search quality to the outside world about how Search works. After Matt left, someone else took over web spam. Meanwhile, I'd retired from journalism writing about search. Google approached me about starting what became a new role of "public liaison of search," which I've done for about six years now. I work within the search quality team, just as Matt did, and that type of two-way communication role he had, I do. In addition, we have an amazing Search Relations team that also works within search quality, and they focus specifically on providing guidance to site owners and creators (my remit is a bit broader than that, so I deal with more than just creator issues).

thanks, Ernie!

I'm the source. I officially work for Google. The account is verified by X. It's followed by the official Google account. It links to my personal account; my personal account links back to it. I'm quoted in the Gizmodo story that links to the tweet. I'm real! Though now perhaps I doubt my own existence....

That Googler here. I do use Google! And yeah, I get sometimes people want older content and we show fresher content. We have systems designed to show fresher content when it seems warranted. You can imagine a lot of people searching about Maui today (sadly) aren't wanting old pages but fresh content about the destruction there.

Our ranking system with freshness is explained more here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking...

But we do show older content, as well. I find often when people are frustrated they get newer content, it's because of that crossover where there's something fresh happening related to the query.

If you haven't tried, consider our before: and after: commands. I hope we'll finally get these out of beta status soon, but they work now. You can do something like before:2023 and we wouldn't show pages from before 2023 (to the best we can determine dates). They're explained more here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272

It's not from Google PR. It's from me. I'm the public liaison for Google Search. I work for our search quality team, not for our PR team.

It's not worded in any way intended to be parsed. I mean, I guess people can do that if they want. But there's no hidden meaning I put in there.

Indexing and ranking are two different things.

Indexing is about gathering content. The internet is big, so we don't index all the pages on it. We try, but there's a lot. If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed. If you have an old page that doesn't seem to change much, we probably aren't running back ever hour to it in order to index it again.

Ranking is separate from indexing. It's how well a page performs after being indexed, based on a variety of different signals we look at.

People who believe removing "old" content aren't generally thinking that's going to make the "new" pages get indexed faster. They might think that maybe it means more of their pages overall from a site could get indexed, but that can include "old" pages they're successful with, too.

The key thing is if you go to the CNET memo mentioned in Gizmodo article, it says this:

"it sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results."

Maybe CNET thinks getting rid of older content does this, but it's not. It's not a thing. We're not looking at a site, counting up all the older pages and then somehow declaring the site overall as "old" and therefore all content within it can't rank as well as if we thought it was somehow a "fresh" site.

That's also the context of my response. You can see from the memo that it's not about "and maybe we can get more pages indexed." It's about ranking.

No one has demonstrated that simply removing content that's "old" means we think a site is "fresh" and therefore should do better. There are people who perhaps updated older content reasonably to keep it up-to-date and find that making it more helpful that way can, in turn, do better in search. That's reasonable. And perhaps that's gotten confused with "remove old, rank better" which is a different thing. Hopefully, people may better understand the difference from some of this discussion.

This is our guidance about how people should see themselves to create helpful content to succeed in Google Search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat...

That includes self-assessment questions, including this:

"Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't.)"

That's not telling people to write longer. Our systems are not designed to reward that. And we'll keep working to improve them.

We don't have a policy or any guidance saying to remove old content. That said, we absolutely recognize a responsibility to help creators understand how to succeed and what not to do in terms of Google Search. That's why we publish lots of information about this (none of which says "old content is bad." A good place to review the information we provide is from our Search Essentials page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials

I work for our search quality team, directly reporting to the head of that team, to help explain how search works to people outside Google and bring concerns and feedback back into team so we can look at ways to improve. I came to the position about six years ago after retiring from writing about search engines as a journalist, explaining how they work to people from 1996 onward.

"We've been diligently working to improve the results" was the response to the question of "Are the employees at Google working on Search aware of how bad search results have become in the past year or two?" I thought that was a clear response.

To be more explicit, yes, we're aware that there are complaints about the quality of search results. That's why we've been working in a variety of ways, as I indicated, to improve those.

We have continued to build our spam fighting systems, our core ranking systems, our systems to reward helpful content. We expanded our product reviews system to cover all types of reviews, as this explains: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/5XRfC46rorevFt8yN...

We regularly improve these systems, which we share about on this page: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw...

The work isn't stopping. You'll continue to see us revise these systems to address some of the concerns people have raised.

No one has demonstrated getting rid of "old" content somehow makes the rest of the site "fresh" and therefore ranks better. What's likely the case is that some people have updated content to make it more useful -- more up-to-date -- and the content being more helpful might, in turn, perform better. That's a much different thing that "if you have a lot of old content, the entire site is somehow old." And if you read the CNET memo, you'll see there's a confusion with these points.

We've been diligently working to improve the results through things like our helpful content system, and that work is continuing. You can read about some of it in a recent post here (and it also describes the Perspectives feature that's live on mobile): https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-perspectiv...

I work for Google and do come into HN occasionally. See my profile and my comments here. I'd come more often if it were easier to know when there's something Google Search-related happening. There's no good "monitor HN for X terms" thing I've found. But I do try to check, and sometimes people ping me.

In addition, if you want an explanation of how Google works, we have an entire web site for that: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/

The engineers at Google do know how our algorithmic systems work because they write them. And the engineers I work with at Google looking at the article about this found it strange anyone believes this. It's not our advice. We don't somehow add up all the "old" pages on a site to decide a site is too "old" to rank. There's plenty of "old" content that ranks; plenty of sites that have "old" content that rank. If you or anyone wants our advice on what we do look for, this is a good starting page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat...

I did the tweet. It is clearly not saying anything about the "average page rank" of your articles because those words don't appear in the tweet at all. And PageRank isn't the only factor we use in ranking pages. And it's not related to "gosh, we could crawl your page in X hours therefore you get more PageRank."

Hi. So I'm the person at Google quoted in the article and also who shared about this myth here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800

It's not that we discourage it. It's not something we recommend at all. Not our guidance. Not something we've had a help page about saying "do this" or "don't do this" because it's just not something we've felt (until now) that people would somehow think they should do -- any more than "I'm going to delete all URLs with the letter Y in them because I think Google doesn't like the letter Y."

People are free to believe what they want, of course. But we really don't care if you have "old" pages on your site, and deleting content because you think it's "old" isn't likely to do anything for you.

Likely, this myth is fueled by people who update content on their site to make it more useful. For example, maybe you have a page about how to solve some common computer problem and a better solution comes along. Updating a page might make it more helpful and, in turn, it might perform better.

That's not the same as "delete because old" and "if you have a lot of old content on the site, the entire site is somehow seen as old and won't rank better."

Hello from Google! I work for our search ranking team. Sadly, we can't control publishers who do things that we do not advise and do not recommend.

We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That's not something we've said. I shared this week that it is not something we recommend: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800

This also documents the many times over the years we've also pushed back on this myth: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpfu...

We care quite a bit about search quality. We've made a bunch of changes over the past year to address some concerns that have been raised our Perspective feature which is part of that recent rolled out on mobile https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1673382545730457605 and we have further ranking changes coming soon, as we described here https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-perspectiv...

I tried the example you cited. The "blurb" is called a snippet; the snippet comes from the web page itself. One of the pages had that actual text, which is why it appeared. Why it had it on a page that's primarily about coaxial cable isn't clear, but we'll look into how to improve.

As for sending feedback, each link in the results has a little three dot icon next to it that brings up our "About This Results" panel, and you can send feedback that way.

Also, to belatedly introduce myself, I'm the public liaison for search at Google. It's a position we have within the actual search engineering team to help us gather feedback to improve search quality. Feel free for you or anyone comfortable sharing examples of unhelpful results to flag me about it:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison https://mastodon.social/@searchliaison

I'm with Google Search. I tweeted to the author of the post, but will also share -- this looks to be a bug that we're tracking down. Definitely not what we'd have expected or wanting to have happen for a queries of this nature.