Item — HN Reader

You only remember the queries that don't work. :) Seriously though, we've measurably seen people expect more from search engines over time, so if your impression has stayed constant then we are doing pretty well. In particular, the average query length has increased by ~ 2 words if I'm not mistaken.

Big changes I can think of in the last few years that we've publicly announced:

* The index is several orders of magnitude larger.

* Most documents that you see in results can now go from crawl to serving in a matter of minutes.

* Ranking for the extreme head is pretty much SEO free.

* Improved ranking for long tail documents with little data available about them.

Those are just the really big launches I can remember off the top of my head.

Most of our day to day work in general falls into two categories.

1. Making our existing systems faster, fresher, higher quality. 2. Searching for brand new sources of data, most of which don't work out that well (like in any other research area.) and occasionally finding the diamond in the rough that dramatically changes search results enough for at least the SEO community to notice.

1 comments

> Ranking for the extreme head is pretty much SEO free

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Can't find the relevant blog post, but I believe this was known in the SEO community as the "Vince Update."

Heh. That's awesome. As an SEO, I know that we definitely don't see the extreme head as being "SEO free" - but perhaps we have different definitions of SEO. The people ranking there have definitely thought about how to do that (and done it effectively).

They haven't done it with scraped links and content farms, but they have definitely optimised their business to do well in search engines.

This is the sort of query I'm talking about: http://www.google.com/search?q=airline+tickets

Yep. And I know the smart SEOs behind at least 3 of those rankings. There are more big brands, but there are also big brands who are not ranking there - and I would argue that is not coincidence. SEO is evolving, but whatever the algorithm, there are opportunities to take steps to have your business perform better in the search results.

Equally (and while I very much respect the work you guys are doing and trying to do) there are massive head terms where I know how much the top-ranking sites are paying for links. When they stop, they slip. The job is not done. (But you know that).

Keep in mind that just because the SEO is employed there doesn't mean they are responsible for the rankings. :)

In general though, I agree with you, and it will get better.