Yesterday two SEO & search engine experts, Rand Fishkin and Bill Slawski, were taking the time to look into the technologies behind two separate search engines; Google & Ask.com.
Rand is trying to figure out the Google algorithmic formula and has simplified his Search Engine Ranking Factors research into one short and simple formula:
(KW Usage Score * 0.3) + (Domain Strength * 0.25) + (Inbound Link Score * 0.25) + (User Data * 0.1) + (Content Quality Score * 0.1) + (Manual Boosts) – (Automated & Manual Penalties)
Rand explains the components of the formula in more detail at the SEOmoz blog.
How accurate is Mr. Fishkin’s shot at figuring out the Google algo-rythm?
SEO consulting whiz Todd Malicoat says for all to “print it out and memorize it, and cater all your decisions around it, and you will understand SEO as more than just a process.”
On the other side of the search engine spectrum, Bill Slawski has found some interesting presentations and papers on Ask.com’s infrastructure and its Expertrank system.
Bill highlights a presentation by Tao Yang, Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President at Ask.com and one of the co-inventors of the Expertrank (Teoma) search algorithm.
The presentation covers an overview of the company and its products, the Expertrank ranking system, and the challenges that the company faces in building a scalable information system including the Neptune middleware that they use and fault detection and isolation. The description of Expertrank is a nice high level look at their system of ranking.
