Google Index Quality Metrics

How do they judge the quality of an index?

[atadams]

Does anybody have any idea how Google judges the quality of their indexes?

[chris_f]

They do searches like we do. Everytime they role out an index they test x number of search terms. I think it was around 12k but I'm not sure.

Chris

[atadams]

But what do they look for? How do they judge the quality of the results for those results?

[vitaplease]

Of course every now and then a search engine could "try" to spam itself.

(quote from mr. Teoma from Pubcon - or words to that effect)

[ciml]

Good point, it would make sense for search engines to employ people to spam. The output wouldn't even need to end up in the public index.

I assume that part of the reason for Google's occasional click tracking is to find how far users have to dig through the results to find what they're looking for. That would produce nice comparisons over time.

[Fiver_321]

Maybe they do a search, look at the number of sites with guestbook backlinks which show in the top results, if there are lots of sites ranking high with guestbook inbounds, jobs a good un.

If they find that the top ranking sites are doing so without guestbook links, then they tweak and re-run.

Its the only way to be sure.

;)