The secret ranking factors, of which there are about 14,000, provide deep insight into Google's search operations, which up until now have been hidden. Some longtime speculation and assumptions about the API are already being challenged as the leak exposes the ugly truth about Google's censorship schematics.
A May 5 email from someone claiming to have access to a significant and verified leak of Google's API documentation wrote that former company employees verified the code as authentic, even though much of it directly conflicts with public statements made by Google employees over the years.
For a considerable while, Google denied employing what Great Game India describes as "click-centric user signals," which the leaked API suggests is happening. Google also denies:
- Considering subdomains separately in rankings
- Creating a "sandbox" for newer websites
- Collecting and considering a domain's age
When Google publicly denied all this, natural skepticism arose. Now, we have the API leak to verify what many said for years was a spate of lies and deception from the world's most recognized search engine.
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The source that gained access to the leaked API issued a series of claims, some of which appear extraordinary. We will unpack some of them for you here for your consideration.
First off, Google's search team is said to have recognized a need in the company's early years for full clickstream data on a large number of web users, all to improve the company's search engine result quality. Clickstream data, by the way, means a log of every URL visited by a browser.
To accommodate this, Google utilized a system called NavBoost, as confirmed by Pandu Nayak, Google's vice president of Search, that gathered data from Google's Toolbar PageRank. When this was not enough, Google eventually unveiled a spy browser called Chrome in 2008.
"NavBoost uses the number of searches for a given keyword to identify trending search demand, the number of clicks on a search result ... and long clicks versus short clicks," reported Great Game India.
If you use Chrome, Google is also spying on your cookie history and logged-in Chrome data, as well as using pattern detection, also known as "unsquashed" clicks versus "squashed" clicks in the API data, to fight manual and automated click spam.
"NavBoost also scores queries for user intent. For example, certain thresholds of attention and clicks on videos or images will trigger video or image features for that query and related, NavBoost-associated queries."
Not only does Google examine users' clicks and engagement on searches before the main query but also after, this referred to in the API as a "NavBoost query."
"For instance, if many users search for 'Rand Fishkin,' don't find SparkToro, and immediately change their query to 'SparkToro' and click SparkToro.com in the search result, SparkToro.com (and websites mentioning 'SparkToro') will receive a boost in the search results for the 'Rand Fishkin' keyword," Great Game India explained.
"NavBoost's data is used at the host level for evaluating a site's overall quality (my anonymous source speculated that this could be what Google and SEOs called 'Panda'). This evaluation can result in a boost or a demotion."
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