When they come out with new algorithms for searching, they are completely replacing their old engine, correct? Are they rewriting the core? Or is this more like v1 was PageRank, v2 was Caffeine, and Hummingbird is v3? Is a lot of the code is just being refactored or is everything getting rewritten?
It's more likely that they stand up several current versions in parallel, and progressively route more traffic to the new algorithms/services. At least that's what I'd do, if I had no technical, infrastructure or monetary budget.
I'd be surprised if that's not how they do it. Less for budgetary reasons and more for testing, doing it this way would let them see if they get the results they are after in aggregate for more useful queries
according to the techcrunch article [1] the announcement was pretty light on details. Google invited reporters to a little birthday party and said "oh, yeah, we totally overhauled our search algo the other day".
Has anyone produced examples of queries that are better than they were before?
I tried "asking some questions" but the fact that my first test question ended up being 'how many eggs are in a dozen?' demonstrates that I'm currently not in the most creative of moods. :)
Following the lead of the article, I searched for "nutritional benefits of olive oil vs canola oil" and all I got was a bunch of links (as expected). No new fancy "within-google" nutritional table.
Who is with me in wanting Google to release a web search product?
You type in the search terms, Google will find you websites and websites only containing those terms. Simple.
Something that just searches the web, http and https, no fancy features. Basically the Google of about 1999, with algorithm tweaks. And maybe with a way for A-B testing to establish which websites are better. KISS.
Verbatim search, and it's already there. It's annoying to regularly use (3 clicks, but those clicks will get old if you use it every time), but I believe people have found either the wildcarded URL for search bars or browser extensions to always use it.
