How Google Ranks Search Results

As the European Commission opens an anti-trust enquiry into Google, the company has revealed details of how it ranks its search results. Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow responsible for ranking, says Google processes hundreds of millions of searches a day. More than one in five is a completely new query. Singhal defends the use of algorithms by saying that not only would it be impossible to handle queries by hand, but it wouldn't give the same level of quality.

"Every day we get the right answers for people, and every day we get stumped. And we love getting stumped. Because more often than not, a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm," he says.