Google is giving the public a little bit of insight into its rarely discussed ranking system.
Google Fellow Amit Singhal posted a detailed blog discussing some common questions about the mysterious process, such as whether Google ever manually edits results:
“Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.”
Singhal doesn’t go into any explanation of the technologies or the algorithms driving the ranking. He does say, however, that those topics will come up in a future posting.