dannysullivan

7 ms·

1.
by dannysullivan 3y ago
I work for Google Search. Apologies for this! It’s been fixed now and posted to our search status dashboard https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
I absolutely don't think it's a laughing matter. I made a joke in the interview with the reporter as a kind of icebreaker (which clearly didn't seem to go well). But as I also explained after doing that, "I’m pretty sure
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
It's because when I was interviewed, what I said was all speaking officially for Google. You can attribute anything there to the company directly. My blog post -- I wrote that on my own. No one from the Google communications team revie
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
I know it was a long post I made. But yes, I (and we) recognize people want the results better. I covered this at the end (along with some other parts): "That said, there’s room to improve. There always is. Search and content can move
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
I get this view. But as my post explains, I'd quit writing about search. I was done. There wasn't going to be more criticism (or praise or whatever) from me because I'd retired from writing about search. I didn't have pl
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
I was on vacation when this came up, so playing some catch up. I work for Google Search. I've been very involved with the concerns raised about quoted searches last year, especially because they never stopped working. They do work. We
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
"They say that old content does actually affect a site in terms of it’s average ranking" -- We didn't say this. We said the exact opposite.
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
You're asking about freshness, not oldness. IE: we have systems that are designed to show fresh content, relatively speaking -- matter of days. It's not the same as "this article is from 2005 so it's old don't show
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
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"
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
There is. Which is why I specifically talked only about writing for algorithmic systems. Machine learning systems are different, and not everyone fully understands how they work, only that they do and can be influenced.
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
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
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
No. But it's also complicated, as Matt did thinks beyond web spam. Matt worked within the search quality team, and he communicated a lot from search quality to the outside world about how Search works. After Matt left, someone else too
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
thanks, Ernie!
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
I'm the source. I officially work for Google. The account is verified by X. It's followed by the official Google account. It links to my personal account; my personal account links back to it. I'm quoted in the Gizmodo story
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
That Googler here. I do use Google! And yeah, I get sometimes people want older content and we show fresher content. We have systems designed to show fresher content when it seems warranted. You can imagine a lot of people searching about M
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
It's not from Google PR. It's from me. I'm the public liaison for Google Search. I work for our search quality team, not for our PR team. It's not worded in any way intended to be parsed. I mean, I guess people can do th
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
No one has demonstrated that simply removing content that's "old" means we think a site is "fresh" and therefore should do better. There are people who perhaps updated older content reasonably to keep it up-to-dat
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
This is our guidance about how people should see themselves to create helpful content to succeed in Google Search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat... That includes self-assessment
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
We don't have a policy or any guidance saying to remove old content. That said, we absolutely recognize a responsibility to help creators understand how to succeed and what not to do in terms of Google Search. That's why we publis
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
I work for our search quality team, directly reporting to the head of that team, to help explain how search works to people outside Google and bring concerns and feedback back into team so we can look at ways to improve. I came to the posit
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
"We've been diligently working to improve the results" was the response to the question of "Are the employees at Google working on Search aware of how bad search results have become in the past year or two?" I thoug
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
No one has demonstrated getting rid of "old" content somehow makes the rest of the site "fresh" and therefore ranks better. What's likely the case is that some people have updated content to make it more useful -- m
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
We've been diligently working to improve the results through things like our helpful content system, and that work is continuing. You can read about some of it in a recent post here (and it also describes the Perspectives feature that&
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
I work for Google and do come into HN occasionally. See my profile and my comments here. I'd come more often if it were easier to know when there's something Google Search-related happening. There's no good "monitor HN f
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
The engineers at Google do know how our algorithmic systems work because they write them. And the engineers I work with at Google looking at the article about this found it strange anyone believes this. It's not our advice. We don&#x27
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
I did the tweet. It is clearly not saying anything about the "average page rank" of your articles because those words don't appear in the tweet at all. And PageRank isn't the only factor we use in ranking pages. And it
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
Hi. So I'm the person at Google quoted in the article and also who shared about this myth here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 It's not that we discourage it. It's not
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
Hello from Google! I work for our search ranking team. Sadly, we can't control publishers who do things that we do not advise and do not recommend. We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That&#x27
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by dannysullivan 3y ago
We care quite a bit about search quality. We've made a bunch of changes over the past year to address some concerns that have been raised our Perspective feature which is part of that recent rolled out on mobile https://twit
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
I'm with Google Search. I tweeted to the author of the post, but will also share -- this looks to be a bug that we're tracking down. Definitely not what we'd have expected or wanting to have happen for a queries of this natur

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