[HN Gopher] Google won't comment on a leak of its search algorit...
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Google won't comment on a leak of its search algorithm
documentation
Author : janandonly
Score : 117 points
Date : 2024-05-28 20:32 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| It's still online, grab it while you can
|
| https://github.com/googleapis/elixir-google-api/commit/078b4...
| winddude wrote:
| I think the repo was also cloned here...
| <https://github.com/yoshi-code-bot/elixir-google-
| api/commit/d...> and considering the original repo is apache
| 2... not sure they can legally force them to be removed.
| jart wrote:
| What am I looking at?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| You're looking at a commit that contains all of the leaked
| files/documentation conveniently on the directory view on
| side of the github page.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Licenses don't work like that. Accidentally releasing
| something under a license doesn't mean it will forever carry
| that license.
| robswc wrote:
| for someone far removed from SEO, what are the true (non-
| sensationalist headline) effects of this leak?
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| A lot more spam than usual in your search results.
|
| A leak like this (if it's actually as substantial as people say
| it is) combined with google's ham fisted way to insert LLM
| results into its search could really mean that google search
| quality will crater in the coming months, potentially opening
| up space for competitors or reducing usage in a real way.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Crater worse than it already is?
| robswc wrote:
| It has really gotten so bad. I get so much reddit spam
| lately. In a lot of cases reddit can be a great... but man,
| the astroturfing has gotten insane.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Long time dev/designer and part-time SEO person here.
|
| The major implications are that a lot of what Google was
| telling SEO practitioners were a lie or cleverly disguised red
| herrings wrapped up in semantics.
|
| The article that was posted earlier today went through a lot of
| the stuff they were lying about with examples of Matt Cutts and
| Gary Ilyes statements that are now directly contradicted with
| the recent release of this code.
|
| Here is the article: https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak
|
| The premise:
|
| _What I'll do here is contextualize some of the most
| interesting ranking systems and features (at least, those I was
| able to find in the first few hours of reviewing this massive
| leak) based on my extensive research and things that Google has
| told /lied to us about over the years._
|
| _"Lied" is harsh, but it's the only accurate word to use here.
| While I don't necessarily fault Google's public representatives
| for protecting their proprietary information, I do take issue
| with their efforts to actively discredit people in the
| marketing, tech, and journalism worlds who have presented
| reproducible discoveries._
| luma wrote:
| Normally I'm not here to defend the likes of Google, but when
| it comes to their communications to SEO practitioners, I'm OK
| with some intentional misdirection and outright lies.
| robswc wrote:
| Makes sense. I used to have a youtube channel that got a few
| age-restricted videos (for absolutely silly reasons). Reps
| from youtube would swear up and down that age-restrictions
| wouldn't effect your video's ranking in the algorithms but it
| was so well known in most creator circles how untrue that
| was.
|
| Thank you for that link, I'll have to check it out!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Quick, have a LLM read it as that magically removes copyright.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It was leaked under an open source license.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| I don't believe that was an authorized publishing.
| thih9 wrote:
| For all we know, it was made by a person/bot/process
| authorized to publish to an official Google repository[1].
|
| It may have been accidental, sure[2]. But is there a basis
| to claim unauthorized action?
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40505708
|
| [2]: Reminds me of "Night of the Living Dead", which
| accidentally became public domain; source:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_Dead
| thih9 wrote:
| It should be enough to have it online, soon AIs would pick it
| up.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Where money can be made, money will be made.
|
| Google lied? Of course they did. And Microsoft, consistently
| (with their pool of NOBUS).
|
| In articles/stories like that my mind wanders to the ST land and
| the Rules of Acquisition
| (https://projectsanctuary.com/the_complete_ferengi_rules_of_a...)
|
| 125. A lie isn't a lie until someone else knows the truth
| fouc wrote:
| I didn't know Google used Elixir internally
| wging wrote:
| I don't think this leak shows that they use Elixir. It's open-
| source code that Google _customers_ are supposed to be able to
| use to interact with Google APIs. It 's natural to provide
| support for your customers to use the languages they want to
| use, rather than the ones you've settled on internally; this is
| important for anyone, let alone restrictive internal
| environments like Google's is supposed to be.
| (https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-php/ exists, but Amazon
| famously doesn't allow services to be developed in PHP.) Google
| is famous for allowing only a few languages for production
| code.
|
| The README also says:
|
| > Disclaimer
|
| > This is not an officially supported Google product.
|
| which, while it doesn't _directly_ indicate that Elixir isn 't
| used internally to Google, would be a surprising mismatch of
| support if they did use Elixir. Here are their official clients
| (including some in languages that I doubt they want to be used
| internally for service development, like PHP, Node.js, and
| .NET): https://developers.google.com/api-client-library
| sixhobbits wrote:
| The Rand Fishkin article that this refers to is a much better
| source
|
| https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousa...
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Though the documents aren't exactly a smoking gun_
|
| Smoking gun of what? The article never seems to actually say.
|
| The only accusation I see is that SEO grifters were lied to by
| Google Search docs, but you look at the article like[1] it's over
| things like "Google always said Domain Authority isn't a thing,
| but we found a variable site_authority. We don't know what it's
| for or what it does, but clearly we were right". Which, even if
| true, isn't a thing I care about at all...
|
| [1] https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak
| xnx wrote:
| SEO discussion is notoriously high noise and low signal. It's
| mainly conjecture, assumption, and superstition. Like a lot of
| things, if they knew what worked, they wouldn't be sharing it.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I'm not sure calling folks like Rand Fishkin a grifter is all
| that accurate, to put it politely.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I believe for a while that Google didn't consider Domain
| Authority much.
|
| For a while, I would create pages like "Bank of XYZ Phone
| Numbers" or "Phone Numbers for $ThatTelecomYouHate" and often
| rank #1.
|
| Which made sense, because my page was just a very parseable
| page of their actual phone numbers, but obviously risk for harm
| there.
|
| Phone numbers on the actual orgs' websites were hard to find
| because, well, they wanted you to do anything but call them
| because calling cost them money. And the big corp websites were
| always an SEO mess that I'm not surprised a crawler could not
| comprehend.
|
| Of course the ads were all for competitors, so I enjoyed making
| money and costing them customers at the same time.
|
| After some years, Google would start returning you 10 different
| results from the orgs' websites, playing into their hand of
| having you do anything but call your bank/telco.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Publicly lying about how a core product works is notable, and
| would be a big deal for any other company. Reminds me of
| Apple's "we treat all developers equally" statements before it
| was made clear Spotify didn't pay a dime on their in-app subs.
|
| You're right that the real impact is limited though, people
| woun't be moving to another search engine anyway.
| butler14 wrote:
| Perhaps surprisingly to the HN community, a lot of what is coming
| out confirms what decent SEOs have been saying for years (and
| appears to contradict a lot of what Google have said publicly via
| their various talking heads)
| mdorazio wrote:
| Since this seems to be most relevant to SEO practitioners I might
| as well ask a loaded question. Given how prevalent spam sites are
| in search results now and how bad Google seems to be at filtering
| them out, what's the argument for how SEO is a good thing in
| aggregate?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > how SEO is a good thing
|
| Are you asking whether people want discoverability for their
| product/companies ?
|
| Or if they're willing to give up agency and leave it to a third
| party for-profit corporation to dictate what is surfaced in
| people's generic searches ?
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(page generated 2024-05-28 23:02 UTC)