Posts Tagged ‘shares’

Google Shares Three Ranking Philosophies

Monday, July 14th, 2008

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.”

Hide in the (Network) Neighborhood

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Don’t want your XP computer to show up in the network browse list (Network Neighborhood/My Network Places) to other users on your network? One way to accomplish that is to disable file sharing. To do this, click Start, right click My Network Places and select Properties. Right click your local area connection and click Properties. Uncheck the box that says File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks. Click OK.

But what if you want to be able to share folders with some users; you just don’t want everyone on the network to see your computer’s shares? There’s a way:

Click Start and select Run.
In the Run box, type net config server /hidden:yes
Click OK.
Now others who know the UNC path (\\computer name\share name) can connect to your computer’s shares from the Run box, but it won’t show up in the network browse list.