Well, in his blog post, Amit Singhal DOES explain the three main principles governing Google’s search technologies. And explaining the principles is probably as revealing as Google is willing to be…

So what are the three principles governing Google’s ranking technologies? They are as follows:

1. Understanding Pages

Google aims to understand pages by, firstly, associating important concepts to a page even if these aren’t obvious on the page. It also seeks to distinguish between important and less important words in the page, as well as the freshness of the information on the page.

2. Understanding Queries

Google aims to understand what users are looking for - beyond what they type into Google’s search box - by utilizing such technologies as its spelling suggestion system, synonyms system, and concept analysis system. This last system aims to identify critical concepts in the search query in order to deliver more relevant results.

3. Understanding Users

Here Google aims to return results people really want, not just what they seem to want by virtue of their search query. To this end, Google uses its localization system, a personalization technology, and other technologies to help interpret users’ real motivations.

So what does all this tell Internet marketers and search engine optimizers? Everything and nothing.

“Everything” because Amit’s post reinforces the fact that Google’s main aim (apart from global domination) is to deliver relevant results. Your best bet in optimizing your website(s) for given keywords and keyphrases is to offer content that is relevant to those search words.

Yet it also tells us nothing… simply because it tells us that Google’s main aim is to deliver relevant content.

We already know that Google wants to give people search results that are relevant to what they’re looking for!

What we don’t know is why and how Google’s algorithm reaches the conclusion that our competitor’s websites are more or less relevant than ours. And why this conclusion keeps on changing based on… what?

Sure, SEO experts have theories. Theories that are probably close to the truth.

But Google certainly ain’t gonna lay it out for us any time soon!

Source: Amit Singhal, “Technologies Behind Google Ranking”, Google Blog, July 16, 2008