Waves of Pleasure

You can read a lot about what search engineers want by looking at how the search results change. You can learn a bit more by listening to how they try to guide / influence / manipulate the market while engaging in discourse. And you can learn a lot more by reading their guidelines for how they expect people to rate search quality.

Thereasons that the internal communication documents are so powerful are

• theydo not discuss search from “in an ideal world” approach, but cover the current marketplace from a pragmatic standpoint solving real issues
• thedocuments may display algorithmic holes that require manual intervention
• thedocuments may show clues as to the hints search engineers give raters to quickly infer quality and relevancy
• thedocuments show issues or relevancy infractions that merit a lower relevancy rating
• thedocuments show how ratings change based on the quality and availability of information on the topic
• howsomething that is considered spam in some instances is considered fine if it is associated with a large well known brand
• howthings that are relevant in some verticals are irrelevant in others if Google runs a competing offering
• thecurrent documents are the result of years of back and forth communication between quality raters and search engineers

For organic search junkies the Google Gods have tossed us another gift. An SEO Black Hat member discovered an April 2007 Google Evaluation Guidelines document, referenced here.

here.