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Fun timing to read this, this last weekend I was playing around with making my own search engine to understand better how ElasticSearch and Lucene work. It occ
by ngngngng 7y ago
Fun timing to read this, this last weekend I was playing around with making my own search engine to understand better how ElasticSearch and Lucene work.
It occurred to me that the two most powerful things Google has to work with are records of clicks, and the time users spent on the webpages Google returned. I've argued against Google monopoly before because I can throw together a web crawler and search engine in a weekend, so it's not like it's a hard market to enter.
> According to W3Techs, Google Analytics is being used by 52.9 percent of all websites on the internet
This is the real problem though. When a search engine sees a new query, it uses everything it's got to assert which pages the user wants, but with Google Analytics, they can test their assertions constantly to see if a user actually wanted that web page. Then your future queries could be compared against previous queries that were validated by a user spending several minutes of active time on the returned page.
I'm sure Google's algorithm is great and all, but I really think this is what sets them apart.
- tantalor 7y ago> but with Google Analytics... No: "Search does not use Google Analytics for ranking" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLmO1GE4GvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLmO1GE4GvI
- ngngngng 7y agoI think you misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not saying Google analytics will get you ranked higher or lower. Just that Google can use the data from analytics to tell if their results were what the user wanted.
- tantalor 7y ago> tell if their results were what the user wanted That's ranking.
- marcosdumay 7y agoThat's validating the rank. Ranking is done in another step. If they use the data for ranking, they'll lose the huge amount of value it has for validating.
- bambax 7y agoIt doesn't even have to link the results to a specific user, linking them to the search terms is enough. It's possible to achieve something similar by measuring bounce rate, but in any case, the sheer number of searches is what matters. For new entrants, this kind of expertise will be very hard to get.