Udi Manber, a lead search engineer at Google lists the teams that comprise the search functionality.
He discusses the search quality group, which is responsible for the ranking of search results. He
Web search is the most used Google search service, and the same ranking algorithms are also used with some modifications, for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search & code search.
Teams Within Search Quality
- Core Ranking
- International Search
- User Interfaces
- Evaluation
- Webspam
These core teams manage billions of web pages and millions of daily searches
Google Ranking Philosophy
- Best locally relevant results served globally
- Keep it simple
- No manual intervention
This is a very good PR piece published by the search team. Points 1 & 2 are true and correct, however point 3 ‘No manual intervention’ is false. Google hand edits results all the time. If you do a competitive keyword search on Google it is likely some results have been omitted by humans.
The Google Search Blog discusses details of Google Ranking intricacies and how hundreds of search engineers manage the Search Engine Results Pages.