[dannysullivan]

I actually work for our search quality team, and my job is to foster two-way communication between the search quality team and those outside Google. When issues come up outside Google, I try to explain what's happened to the best I can. I bring feedback into the search quality team and Google Search generally to help foster potential improvements we can make.

[mrguyorama]

Yes. All this is saying that you do not write any code for the search algorithms. Do you know how to code? Do you have access to those repos internally? Do you read them regularly? Or are you only aware of what people tell you in meetings about it.

Your job is not to disseminate accurate information about how the algorithm works but rather to disseminate information that google has decided it wants people to know. Those are two extremely different things in this context.

I work on these kind of vague "algorithm" style products in my job, and I know that unless you are knee deep in it day to day, you have zero understanding of what it ACTUALLY does, what it ACTUALLY rewards, what it ACTUALLY punishes, which can be very different from what you were hoping it would reward and punish when you build and train it. Machine learning still does not have the kind of explanatory power to do any better than that.

[dannysullivan]

No. I don't code. I'm not an engineer. That doesn't mean I can't communicate how Google Search works. And our systems do not calculate how much "old" content is on a site to determine if it is "fresh" enough to rank better. The engineers I work with reading about all this today find it strange anyone thinks this.