Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Google SearchRank?

I just realized that I've read Google literature on storing and
searching web pages, but not on storing and searching (or otherwise
analyzing) searches (user search phrases)?

What do they do here? Do they use the same technologies as for pages?
Store it in BigTable? Analyze it using MapReduce? Do they compute a
"SearchRank", i.e. the rank of a page based on how often it is clicked
when presented as part of a search result set? Do they take combine
this with the page's PageRank before displaying the TopK results?

What other analytics do they perform on search results? User-visible
"analytics" examples include Google Trends and Zeitgeist but those
are just pure aggregation and ordering.