Google search interface explained by exec

04/08/2008

Google engineer Ben Gomes has shed more light on the way in which the search engine operates on the company's official blog as part of a series of posts on the issue of search quality - an issue that may be of importance to search optimisation.

The executive looked at the Google search interface and said that while it is still essentially the same as it was several years ago, Google is nevertheless constantly testing changes and improvements for the benefit of the user.

He explained features such as the addition of dates and titles for websites where there is no HTML for web page titles to the snippets shown in Google search results, as well as how the search engine copes when it comes to misspellings.

Mr Gomes stated: "We have been making improvements to our snippets over time with algorithms for determining the relevance of portions of the page.

"The changes range from the subtle - we highlight synonyms of your query terms in the results - to [the] more obvious."

Last week, Rachel Garb of Google revealed that the search engine now alerts users when it customises search results based on location, search history or previous website visits.