Google says no manual intervention in rankings

10th July 2008

Search giant Google has opened up about its ranking procedures, stating that it does not manually change results and relies completely on its algorithm.

Writing on the official Google blog, Google fellow Amit Singhal asserted that the company sticks to the principle of "no manual intervention" because it believes this is the best way to organise search results.

Mr Singhal commented: "Information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity."

He added that a broken query can lead to a potential improvement of the algorithm, resulting in benefits for search results in a range of languages and across entire query classes.

Google has previously attempted to be more open about its operations in this way - the company explained some of its Search Quality mechanisms in a post in May.