Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation
Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation
The leak reportedly details what data Google collects for ranking.
A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.
The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.
Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives
I would have never guessed that.
Crazy how self regulation always winds up like this. By crazy I mean predictable of course.
This doesn't have anything to with regulation. This is mainly a bunch of SEO and marketing people whining that Google hasn't been honest with them in telling them exactly how to game their search engine.
Well I am just shocked, SHOCKED. Well, not that shocked.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Can't wait for selfhosted web search to become better.
You mean hosting your own crawler/indexer? That doesn't really sound like a thing you could do cost-effectively.
Surprisingly, it's very doable, requires basic technical knowledge and relatively minimal computing resources (runs in the background on your computer).
I have tampermonkey script that sends yacy to crawl any websites that I visit, and it's keeping up relatively good index for personal use of the visited websites. Combine yacy with ~300gb of Kiwix databases, add searxng as a frontend and you have pretty strong self hosted search engine.
Of course you need to supplement your searches from other search engines, as yacy does not crawl the whole web, just what you tell it to.
I encourage anyone who's even slightly interested on this stuff to try Yacy, it's ancient piece of software, but it still works very well and is not an abandoned project yet!
--
I personally use Yacy mostly on private mode, but it does have the distributed network there as well.
Right!
Before his company was able to block more of Microsoft's own tracking scripts, DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg explained in a Reddit reply why firms like his weren't going the full DIY route:
“… [W]e source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing … Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product. The same is true for maps btw -- only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood.”
You could use Common Crawl, it's run by a non profit
Look up the yacy repo in github
How is that even supposed to work? These search engines need per definition massive databanks to search through. Either you need your own crawler and indexer which is more than just inefficient, or you are limited to a relatively short list of curated static results.
If they're taking tips from Google, why would they get better?
Google actually was good, so there's probably some good information in this documentation. If nothing else we can perhaps figure out what "went wrong."
Edit: I've been reading the blog post that appears to be the main person the leak was shared with and there's a lot of in-depth analysis being done there, but I'm not seeing a link to the actual documents. This is a huge article, though, I might be overlooking it.
What are the current contenders?
What it looks like beyond Google and Bing
It would be much harder to know what exists beyond "GBY" (Google, Bing, Yandex) and how it all works without the work of Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar. For three years, Kumar has been updating a heavily annotated list of search engines with their own indexes. It is 7,000 words, but only a portion of it deals with engines offering general indexing, in the English language. You can read Kumar's evaluation methodology for a better understanding of how he compared and assessed sites.
What stands out? Mojeek ("it's not bad… I'd live") and Stract ("a useful supplement to more major engines") are two of Kumar's favorites. Right Dao has "very fast, good results," in part because its crawler starts off from Wikipedia. Yep reaches farther out, showing results that link to and back from sites related to your query and also promises to share ad revenue with creators. All of them show promise, but you get the sense that they're a second car, or a third bicycle, rather than a primary transport.
There are far smaller-scoped engines in other sections of Kumar's post. If you're wondering where that one other search engine you've heard about is, it's probably in the "Semi-independent indexes" section, because it uses a GBY index when its own results are not strong enough. Here, you'll find cryptocurrency-friendly, controversy-courting-founder-having Brave, a few engines that either "resell" GBY results or stuff affiliate links into them, and "the most interesting entry," according to Kumar, Kagi.
Kagi requires an account and uses its own index, Teclis, in combination with Google, Bing, Yandex, Mojeek, and others, including, notably, Brave. Kagi's founder has strong opinions on the AI-based future of search and responding to harmful searches in ways that are not "scalable." How much of that does or does not bother you will vary, but it's worth noting that Kagi also suffers when the GBY triumvirate is restricted.
Ars Technica this week: Bing outage shows just how little competition Google search really has
The referenced search engine comparison by Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar
YaCy, Mwmbl, Alexandria, Stract, Marginalia to name a few.
Google has been pretty crap for a decade now.
I still remember demoing how easily they can manipulate people by searching "Pakistan News" and the results being exclusively all Indian media outlet propaganda way back in 2016.
I really feel like they never got properly exposed for this just because it's a search engine and not a social media, so people didn't care enough about it. Also because Google was still top of the game in most results compared to other sites back then.
My thought exactly. If this was back in like 2010, it would be a real oh shit moment, The key to the kingdom has been leaked. Now I don't think anybody really cares other than SEO spammers who will game the system even more than they already are.
Google search is crap and has been crap for some time. Not sure any others are better. But it started going downhill with the Google Plus social network, when they removed "+" as a search operator so you could better search for 'Google+' that was the first time they messed with Search to further some other business goal. It wasn't the last time. Back when Google was good, they publicly said their goal was to get you off their site as fast as possible. Now the results reek of engagement algorithm bullshit.
SearXNG works all right for me, and it's free. I've also heard good things about the paid service Kagi.
Rand Fishkin, who worked in SEO for more than a decade, says a source shared 2,500 pages of documents with him with the hopes that reporting on the leak would counter the “lies” that Google employees had shared about how the search algorithm works.
Am I supposed to care that the poor SEO assholes that need to get their ads more visibility weren't being given all the instructions on how to do that by the search engine?
Most of this article is SEO "experts" complaining that some of the guidelines they were given didn't match what's in the internal documents.
Google is shit, but SEO is a cancer too. I can't be too bothered by Google jacking them around a bit.
And I supposed to care that the poor SEO assholes that need to get their ads more visibility weren’t being given all the instructions on how to do that by the search engine?
No. You're supposed to care that a company is pointlessly* lying, thus it's extremely likely to deceive, mislead and lie when it gets some benefit out of it.
In other words: SEO arseholes can ligma, Google is lying to you and me too.
*I say "pointlessly" because not disclosing info would achieve practically the same result as lying.
need to get their ads more visibility
I occasionally encounter the desire for a search engine to surface non-advertisement content :)
Now if they lied to advertisers and told small bloggers, reputable news agencies, fediverse admins, etc. the insider secrets… now we’re talkin’!
Historically, Google had a give-and-take with SEO. You can't make SEO companies go away, but you can curb the worst behavior. Google used to punish bad behavior with a poor listing, and you had to do some work to get it back into compliance and tell Google it's fixed up.
It wasn't ideal, but it functioned well enough.
The drive to make search more profitable over the past few years seems to have meant dropping this. SEO companies can get away with whatever. If they now have the whole manual, game over. Google of a decade ago might have done something about it. Google of today won't bother.
Edit: If you’re going to downvote me, please take the time to explain why you think I’m wrong. Stop being the hive mind.
Tell me you don’t know shit about SEO without telling me you don’t know shit about SEO.
Just because there are people who do bad things doesn’t mean the industry is bad or have bad intentions. SEO isn’t ads. Advertorials can be a tactic of SEO, but it’s not SEO as a whole. Same with clickbait because it works, and I guarantee you also fall for it constantly.
SEO is about understanding what someone needs and creating an experience to ensure that someone finds the answer to what they need through content and/or a product to solve their needs.
This can be achieved through copywriting, researching search trends and queries, technical analysis of websites and how they render, providing guidance on helpful assets (photos, pdfs, videos, form, copy, etc), PR outreach because links are how people move around online or discover things, social planning because social media are a form of search engines, and more.
And finally, SEOs are not responsible for how Google treats shit. That’s Google who is responsible. Google is the one that tweaks the algorithm and doesn’t catch spammy shit. In fact many SEOs catch it and report it to Google’s reps, but they are the ones who can ensure the right team(s) fix the issue.
Here's the sooper-secret search result algorithm for whatever you type into Google:
YouTube results, followed by Reddit results, followed by "Sponsored" results, followed by AI-written Bot results, then a couple pages of Amazon results and finally, on page 10 or so, a ten-year-old result that's probably no longer relevant.
That's generally what I've found to be the case, shocking that it's considered so secret lol
awesome, now we can make our own search engine that is filled with complete trash and isn't concerned with helping the user at all.
I want a federated social bookmarking site. Not for news or discussion of recent stuff, but to keep some good sites in your account and to share with others.
Searching those and getting results with attached upvotes/downvotes would be ideal
Interesting concept. Like if you could upvote/downvoted the SERP and it actually mattered and wasn't easy to manipulate.
Was going to say that I was dreaming of such platform, but then it can be used for more than just links, and work as a decentralized Usenet, and what's more important, as a rating system potentially more resilient to abuse (by bots or by people whose votes you don't care about). Then noticed that you wrote "federated".
You can deferate low quality instances and mods of instances can ban bots that upvote spam
Each instance can have its own theme, like an anime instance that just moderates anime content and can't possibly make judgements on whether the physics content is of high quality
So you want Reddit? We have a federated clone of that. It's Lemmy.
I don't want the latest links, in fact there should be no feed, only search and directories
Now, where to download these, for science.
Use Bing 😅😅
Google it.
Where can one get a hold of these documents?
This appears to be the original blog post, but I'm not finding a way to download this. https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/
Is this not leaked past this one person?
Edit 2: No, these appear to be normal public docs.
Edit: seems these are the docs? https://hexdocs.pm/google_api_content_warehouse/0.4.0/GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.QualityNavboostCrapsCrapsData.html
Grab it while it's still up: https://github.com/yoshi-code-bot/elixir-google-api/commit/d7a637f4391b2174a2cf43ee11e6577a204a161e
I guess we are going to be in for more SEO spam than usual if this document is accurate. But I think its good that we are finally going to get a better understanding how Google manipulates people with the algorithm.
So a win-lose situation.
More seo spam? What isn't already?
Yeah, what isn’t SEO spam—Search Engine Optimization spam, SEO marketing, keyword stuffing, Google keyword stuffing, backlink building, best backlinks, best backlinks for backlink building
Heh. Now I can look forward to a new browser plugin that automatically jumps to the first page of Google results that contains any entry that isn't a Viagra ad. Huge time saver!
Who wants to take bets that Search itself ends up in The Graveyard soon, leaving nothing but the new AI abomination in place?
I could see them not letting you directly search anymore, only through the LLM bot. Because that's been how things have been going anyway, Google seems to fully ignore literal searches with quote marks now, presumably because it doesn't fit their vision of using natural (imprecise) language. So why not make the LLM write the search query for you in a completely opaque way?
You can search, it will just cost you $15/mo for the Google battlepass.
More likely they will just slowly rebrand search to more AI type things. Then slowly retire the non-AI parts in the background.
Honestly I hope this bites them hard. They've done way way worse to small businesses and competition for decades now.
It's honestly quite strange that this sort of black box system is allowed to exist. How are governments around the world OK with a vast majority of the internet being filtered through a private company's lens without any sort of insight into how it works? That sounds skeevy as shit.
Better than those governments having control. Ideal scenario is everything is decentralized
I tried to cry for them but after Googling instructions about how to I poured Elmer's Wood Glue on both eyes. I cannot call the result tears. Not sure what to call it, but certainly not tears.
Someone got a torrent for us?
I haven't checked but its probably on postman on i2p
"How does Google's search algorithm works? -reddit"
The algorithm works with the use of proprietary tchnology.. (read 2500 pages more)This is the best summary I could come up with:
But how exactly Google ranks websites has long been a mystery, pieced together by journalists, researchers, and people working in search engine optimization.
Now, an explosive leak that purports to show thousands of pages of internal documents appears to offer an unprecedented look under the hood of how Search works — and suggests that Google hasn’t been entirely truthful about it for years.
“While I don’t necessarily fault Google’s public representatives for protecting their proprietary information, I do take issue with their efforts to actively discredit people in the marketing, tech, and journalism worlds who have presented reproducible discoveries.”
Fishkin told The Verge in an email that the company has not disputed the veracity of the leak, but that an employee asked him to change some language in the post regarding how an event was characterized.
The pervasive, often annoying tactics have led to a general narrative that Google Search results are getting worse, crowded with junk that website operators feel required to produce to have their sites seen.
The US government’s antitrust case against Google — which revolves around Search — has also led to internal documentation becoming public, offering further insights into how the company’s main product works.
The original article contains 906 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Does Google still have a search algorithm? I thought they now just feed everything into a huge LLM and let it regurgitate statistically plausible answers.
Google Search uses a regular search algorithm. Google AI overview will be a product that feeds from Google search.
No, don't you see, everything we hate must be interrelated somehow.
rubs hands together
Oh thank the tiny gods...
I thought this was going to be a leak of actual information.
