Google Zen: The Answerless Answer

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March 4, 2008

Google Zen: The Answerless Answer

Google's understandably concerned with how the public perceives its data gathering, so when the official Google blog promises some insight into why it does what it does, I'm all ears. The company's combination of affable corporate persona and its willingness to launch phony-baloney crusades makes me hungry for something out of Google besides "we mean you no harm." So I was quick to click through to an entry entitled "Why Data Matters" that promises to describe "how data has been critical to the advancement of search technology."

I should have remembered a quotation for which I've seen various attributions:

"Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

Not because the blog entry Google provided was a stomach-churning descent into the guts of search, but because someone at Google also remembered that quotation and decided to spare us the pain:

"We're constantly experimenting with our algorithm, tuning and tweaking on a weekly basis to come up with more relevant and useful results for our users.

"But in order to come up with new ranking techniques and evaluate if users find them useful, we have to store and analyze search logs. (Watch our videos to see exactly what data we store in our logs.) What results do people click on? How does their behavior change when we change aspects of our algorithm? Using data in the logs, we can compare how well we're doing now at finding useful information for you to how we did a year ago. If we don't keep a history, we have no good way to evaluate our progress and make improvements.

"To choose a simple example: the Google spell checker is based on our analysis of user searches compiled from our logs -- not a dictionary. Similarly, we've had a lot of success in using query data to improve our information about geographic locations, enabling us to provide better local search.

"Storing and analyzing logs of user searches is how Google's algorithm learns to give you more useful results. Just as data availability has driven progress of search in the past, the data in our search logs will certainly be a critical component of future breakthroughs."

In other words, nothing we haven't heard before. A little history mixed in to give everyone something to do until we can get to the real point, which is to reiterate that Google needs to keep all that data because Google needs to keep all that data.

If nothing else, it's a useful reminder of why the geek trope about Google "not really being in it for the advertising" is so pervasive: The company makes genuinely great products that do improve over time, to the point it's easier to focus on what we can easily see -- Google Maps, Gmail -- than what we can't see so easily -- an implicit agreement to risk or simply forfeit our privacy so Google's advertising efficiency can improve.

(Link)

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