Why Google isn’t deterministic
The reasons your search results are not the same as mine
I was having a conversation with my father in law recently where he expressed frustration that the results he gets from Google for a particular search term are no the same as when someone else does. This led to an interesting discussion about why determinism is not a goal (or even desirable) in a search engine.
It’s worth starting with a quick recap of how Google works. Let’s start with how Google determines the most relevant search results for a given query. Starting with the most basic assumption.
Relevance is a factor of how many people feel something is relevant. If you have a web page that is linked to by a hundred other people then this might indicate it is interesting. Let’s say you work in an office with 5 other people — Bob, Sally, Joe, Judy and Simon. You want to know where to go for lunch. Bob, Sally and Joe say go around the corner to Macdonalds’s. Judy and Simon say go to Fernandon’s Brasserie. Which is the right answer?
The simplistic version of this is you go with the option which has the most people advocating it. In its simplest form this is how PageRank works. But, what if Judy has a wildly successful food blog? In this case one might expect to weight the opinion of an expert more highly. And, in fact, this is what Google does. Links are…
