Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation

Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives

I would have never guessed that.

Can't wait for selfhosted web search to become better.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

_{Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)}

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

Now, where to download these, for science.

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.

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.

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.

"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!

rubs hands together

Oh thank the tiny gods...

I thought this was going to be a leak of actual information.