Thursday, March 6

Why [search log] data matters by Hal Varian

Hal Varian posted about user data and privacy on the Google Blog.

What I found interesting from the article"
Over the years, Google has continued to invest in making search better. Our information retrieval experts have added more than 200 additional signals to the algorithms that determine the relevance of websites to a user's query.

So where did those other 200 signals come from? What's the next stage of search, and what do we need to do to find even more relevant information online?

We're constantly experimenting with our algorithm, tuning and tweaking on a weekly basis to come up with more relevant and useful results for our users.

But in order to come up with new ranking techniques and evaluate if users find them useful, we have to store and analyze search logs. (Watch our videos to see exactly what data we store in our logs.) What results do people click on? How does their behavior change when we change aspects of our algorithm? Using data in the logs, we can compare how well we're doing now at finding useful information for you to how we did a year ago. If we don't keep a history, we have no good way to evaluate our progress and make improvements.
Storing and analyzing logs of user searches is how Google's algorithm learns to give you more useful results. Just as data availability has driven progress of search in the past, the data in our search logs will certainly be a critical component of future breakthroughs.
Google and the other major search engine are constantly using search log data to improve the quality of their results, it's good to hear some details emerging.

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