This is a review of the presentation released by Google’s Amit Singhal who is according to the New York Times is “…the master of what Google calls its ranking algorithm”
In the first section of presentation Amit outlines basics structure of search engines and some history: Crawling, Indexing, Ranking, Displaying, Serving.
Spam Challenge
Here’s the spam map by one of Google’s brightest engineers:
users follow search results > money follows users
…spam follows, cluttering search results.
Some of the ways to monetize search results: rerouting traffic from SEs to Amazon/Ebay – make a few bucks. Reroute traffic from SEs to merchant sellers via affiliate links, take up to 50% cut. Redirect to adult site and make good $50 bucks from subscription. Get SE traffic and receive contextual links. Get enough traffic and contextual clicks add up.
Spam is Big Business
There’s HUGE money in spam. Here are Amit’s estimates from few years ago:
500 million searches per day on web (for all search engines).
5% are commercial (more with porn queries)
Assume that each click gets $0.50 (from $0.50 to $40) = $12.5 million per day or $4,5 billion per year.
Spam is not going away, there’s too much money to cash out. Search engines have to come in and police the spam. Once they police the spam and focus search results on information queries, they can serve commercial queries as pay per click ads, making money.
Informational vs Commercial Queries
Google was fueled by a desire for a useful search engine by 2 of it’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Early internet was not commercialized and consisted mainly of information, hence it was natural to give informational results. To this day, most queries are informational, so by placing heavy bias on information Google is killing two birds:
- It gives users what they want – information
- It can sell commercial ads alongside informational results, making money.