This is a guest post by Britney Danila, she is a Freelance and Staff writer who writes informative & creative articles on SEO and Technology for various search engine optimisation company. Her expertise are in writing articles related to internet providers, SEO, Social media etc. 

A Google search query response as we all know presents a list of potential URLs, embedded files and social media conversations that may be of interest to the person entering the query. The results are determined by the Google page index, which lists every web page in the world for its relevance to keywords, phrases, tags and subject headings.



Google attempts to monitor its own results on a pretty regular basis, in the hope that it will:

a. Get better at returning the results people really wanted to find and

b. Stay ahead of people whose job it is to use the known properties of its algorithms to generate good page rankings for their clients.

Here’s the thing: what Google is basically trying to do is mimic the behaviour of a human brain, if it had access to every page in the universe. The ultimate goal of a Google search result (when you leave out the paid for stuff) is to look at all those web pages and say “a person who entered query x would want to see page y”.


Automating the Human Brain

So how does it do it? Monitoring the results is one thing – working out new ways of coming up with better ones is another.

Monitoring is done by looking at the behaviour of searchers with relation to the Page results, over a defined period of time (a useful one, like 100 days). Google uses different metrics to interrogate the behaviour of searchers when confronted by its result Pages, to see how accurately it is returning pages of interest.

So for example it might look at what percentage of users click on the top results. If the percentage is low, there is something wrong with Google’s way of defining a page as interesting in relation to that search query.


Social Media: the Next Part of the Puzzle

Now here’s the other thing. The human brain has already been quantified on the net – by social media. Social media works on the idea that people work by aligning themselves with other people who have similar interests, associations or tribal traits. It then gives greater weight to links and comments sent and made within these self defining groups.

Analysis of social media metrics (the information that people in the social stream have put on their profiles, backed up with collated date about spending habits and sites they visit regularly) allows you to form a matrix that routinely spits out high quality recommendations for query answers.

By incorporating the social media into Page rankings, Google is tapping into a huge online “version” of the decision making brain. First it interrogates the social graph to see where most of the conversation, linking and trending about the keywords in a search query come from. Then it interrogates that part of the social media to find specific URLs, which it can cross reference with the index made by its own web crawlers. The URLs that score high in both cases come out on top.

Automated Metrics to Be Aware Of

Google isn’t stupid, we all know that. That’s why we have the jobs we do.

Using people alone isn’t enough. Using machines alone isn’t enough. So Google backsaw up the social media stream with more metrics designed to check the veracity of the information it is getting from its social stream enquiries.

A metric that examines the length of time routinely spent on clicks through from a suggested URL, for example, allows Google to see if people stay for long on the page it is considering featuring in its search results. If the answer is “yes” the page is assumed to have a high interest value and so goes to the top of the list.

The End Result

The end result you get when you do a Google search is now a blend of all sorts of things – social media stream, traditional URL, images, files that are embedded in popular file sharing sites. All results are there because Google thinks that a person would pick them if he or she had the chance.

Which means you need to think like people when you are optimising your pages.