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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

February, 2010

Editing the Google Algorithm

An article on Google's search algorithm and how it was edited to be smarter.
Wired has a real nice article on Google's search algorithm. It's a real score for the Mountain View massive as it makes the whole process seem not evil at all ... It actually feels quite quaint:
Recently, search engineer Maureen Heymans discovered a problem with "Cindy Louise Greenslade." The algorithm figured out that it should look for a person -- in this case a psychologist in Garden Grove, California -- but it failed to place Greenslade's homepage in the top 10 results. Heymans found that, in essence, Google had downgraded the relevance of her homepage because Greenslade used only her middle initial, not her full middle name as in the query. "We needed to be smarter than that," Heymans says. So she added a signal that looks for middle initials. Now Greenslade's homepage is the fifth result.
February 24, 2010
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.