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The Google Search Quality Team is keeping its promise to explain more about how they conduct their work. As usual and expected, it’s fantastically vague, but since a chunk of our readers at any given time are new to search, it’s worth going over.

Writing on the Official Google blog, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow on the Core Ranking Team, defines Google ranking:

“Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google’s search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more.”

Then he gave three philosophies that the Core Ranking Team follows:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

Singhal says that the team strives for simplicity in their architecture, something that Twitter has been struggling with lately. Obviously, with all the queries conducted and the massive amount of content to be indexed, it coud be easy to piece together a very complex architecture (similar to Google’s woes with their ad products). With approximately 10 ranking updates per week, Singhal says the team takes simplicity in architecture into consideration in every single update.

Singhal also emphasized philosophy #3 - that Google does not hand edit results.

“You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.”

Our parent company owns about 100+ .COM domain names, which Web sites are hosted by 10+ different web hosting providers.

We wanted 10+ different web hosting providers to ensure IP diversity by having several Class C IP addresses. IP diversity was and is still an important requirement for our specific business needs.

It isn’t an easy task to find a perfect web hosting service and it’s even more difficult to find 10+ quality web hosting services that match our minimum requirements.

We spend some months trying and testing about 50+ already well ranked web hosting providers. Most of the cases, we were disappointed by the reliability aspect and by the customer services that lack of technical expertise. We were often forced to cancel the web hosting contract due to the lack of quality of the services.

Finally, after 3 months of testing and reviews, we’ve got our perfect web hosting providers. We consider them “perfect” because they match all our requirements from the time of our testing and until now. You can see the list of requirements below.

As we always like to share our knowledge to contribution in our ways to the Internet community, we will give you the list of those “perfect” web hosting services.

The list is simple and only contains the names of web hosting providers and links to their respective web sites. Some hosting services will be also added later on as well as more technical specifications. We hope it will permit you to avoid losing time and money if you have to select a web hosting provider by yourself.
Top Web Hosting Providers

* ICDSoft
* HostGator   (Promotion code: “JURY’ or “MUSICA’ to get $9.94 off)
* U2–Web   (Promotion code:  “Sep-2006” to get 10% discount for life)
* PolurNET Communications
* Integra-Net Web Services
* Others to be added later on.

Our requirements

Our minimum requirements taken into account during the evaluation phase:

* Linux OS.
* PHP (at least version 4).
* mySQL DB (at least version 4).
* Graphical Control Panel.
* E-mail services (POP3, SMTP, e-mail forwarders, e-mail aliases).
* Good level of reliability. At least 99.9% uptime.
* Quality technical support staff. High technical knowledge and response time of maximum 12 hours.
* Affordable. Less than 10 USD per month.
* Enough disk space. 1 GB disk space is the perfect amount for us. In some cases, we have enough with 250 MB.
* Possibility to have several domain names parked or hosted under the same account.

I don’t know if it’s the absolute best, but a site that I’ve praised in the past is Yelp. They’re a review site and they feature a nice variety of reputation indicators. What I like about Yelp is that they seem to have payed close attention to their community, and what motivates people to write reviews, and their reputation system leverages that nicely. It doesn’t work against it.

A really simple example: some of our own research, at Yahoo, indicates that one reason some people may write reviews is just this desire to ‘fill a void’ or provide a review for a product or venue that has none. (I’ve wondered if this isn’t somehow psychologically related to those guys that like to type ‘first!’ into comment fields.) Now of course this isn’t the only thing that motivates someone to write reviews, but it can be a small motivator for some folks.

Yelp must be aware of this tendency, cause they give users a small boon for being the first person to contribute a review for a business. The first review for any establishment will display a ‘first to review’ badge for ever-after. So it’s not a huge thing. They don’t place a lot of importance on it, but there it is: a small and very natural show of appreciation for those users that like to help get the conversation started.

And Yelp does this in a dozen other ways as well. They have specific reputation types that reward funny Yelpers, or helpful ones. They have a special designation (the Yelp Elite — you’ve written about them before, in fact.) So Yelp encourages a wide range of expression from their review-writers: basically, you can be any kind of ‘Yelper’ you want to be, and—as long as the community finds value in your contributions—Yelp has a way of rewarding you. (And Yelp doesn’t ‘rank’ users against each other, or display a leaderboard anywhere on the site.)

And, of course, I’ve already mentioned XBox Live. I think they do a fantastic job. I believe that they employ just about every pattern from the set that we’ve published, and probably a couple others besides. And all for great effect, for a very specific purpose. BUT… they’re a fairly competitive context, so I think they get a lot of leeway to do things that a lot of social community sites should probably not be doing.

9) What is Yahoo’s strategy in getting these out to the community? Are you simply being altruistic? Wouldn’t these help your competitors?

There are a couple of dimensions to my answer here. First, I’d say that the Pattern Library, in general (which has been open since February of 2006, btw) is a good fit for Yahoo!s stated goals of openness and transparency.

Secondly, there’s nothing especially proprietary about the information or opinions embedded in the patterns. Christian, who I’ve mentioned, actually vets all of our public patterns with our Legal team, so if there actually were some sooper-sekrit game-changing reputation business logic in there…? Well, that probably wouldn’t make it outside the firewall.

But, also, these patterns are in large part drawn from examples and experiences of competitors, as well as products that we’ve shipped at Yahoo! So in a way, it’s not so much ‘getting them out’ to the community as giving them back to the community. There is some work involved in these patterns (compiling, researching, refining and writing them out) but the benefits for us are innumerable: the ability to positively influence the community, be seen as thought-leaders in social software. Heck, just taking part in a smarter dialog about the place of reputation systems… it’s all good.

I’d say 2 related things: one is employing those more empirical patterns— Points, and Levels, ranked and tracked on Leaderboards— in situations where they’re not appropriate. I feel like I’m belaboring the point, but… if your community values fun, and easy-going interactions with each other and helpfulness? Then don’t destroy that fantastic dynamic by comparing members, one to another. Don’t elevate certain members’ status at the expense of everyone else in the community—’cause resentment, factions and gaming are soon to follow.

And related to this is the mistake of rewarding the wrong types of behavior. Specifically, there’s a tendency to want to reward activity (how many times have I contributed, or how frequently) instead of the quality of those contributions. (Do people like this video? Have they watched it? Responded? Linked to it, or embedded it on their blog? Voted for it, or assigned a rating?) Of course, both are important: you want people who are actively engaged and prolific contributors: but you want those contributions to be quality ones: thoughtfully prepared, formatted along community norms, and above all useful or interesting to the community.

A relevant, and recent, example I could cite is Plurk. Now, I absolutely don’t mean to hate on Plurk. It looks like a fine product (it’s kind of a Twitter-like microblogging platform.) But they’re tracking and displaying some very “official-looking” Karma metrics, and even feature a Leaderboard of Interesting Plurkers. My response to this is two-fold: first is… “why”? What community goals does it further? My guess would be that it’s a desire to promote active, high-use Plurkers to the community, that others might find them and opt to follow them as well.

But the prominent Karma score, and a surface appraisal of how it’s generated, might lead one to believe that Plurk is a competition. And, specifically, a competition won by the amount of stuff you do! (Number of Plurks, number of friends, etc.) Most people can see how badly this could end: if someone really wants to make it onto that leaderboard? They’ll probably try mass-friending and spam-blasts first. (Even if Plurk’s system is smart enough to counter this, the overall effect is still negative.) There is a nod to quality—’Quality Plurking’, however that’s defined—but the emphasis appears to be on Activity. And I’d posit that a karma system for an app like this is somewhat extraneous. It kinda smacks of “wouldn’t it be cool if we…”

I also feel compelled to point out that the particular label they use—’Interesting’—is a loaded one: while very complimentary to those who receive it, it’s can also feel derogatory to those who’re left out. There’s a reason why Flickr has only ever applied the descriptor of interestingness to photos, and not the people that take them—and that reason is that the community folks over there have a wonderful awareness of community spirit, and are sensitive to the effects that labels can have.

The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that’s usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occassional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what’s off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.

Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren’t. Just because there’s huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they’re already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you’re launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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Whatever industry or niche you’re in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that’s already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com’s blog search in particular is of very good quality).

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 is available in more than 45 languages as a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed.