...chapter from the 'Google Ranking Bible' with an effort to enlighten us with more information about the technologies behind Google rankings.

According to Amit Singhal of Google, As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR). The IR community has studied search for almost 50 years. It uses statistical signals of word salience, like word frequency, to rank pages. IR gave us a solid foundation, and we have built a tremendous system on top using links, page structure, and many other such innovations.

Here are some of the important points mentioned by Amit:

1. Understanding pages: Google possesses a large and constantly updated index that helps it to effectively conduct the crawling and indexing functions. One of the key technologies we have developed to understand pages is associating important concepts to a page even when they are not obvious on the page. Other technologies we have developed include distinctions between important and less important words in the page and the freshness of the information on the page.
2. Understanding queries: According to Amit, Google as a search engine, emphasizes on the fact that, what user is looking for is paramount. Keeping this in mind, Google has developed technologies like spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system, and a very strong concept analysis system. Synonyms are the foundation of our query understanding work. This is one of the hardest problems we are solving at Google. As a user, I don't want to think too much about what words I should use in my queries. This is where our synonyms system comes into action. Our synonyms system can do sophisticated query modifications, e.g., it knows that the word 'Dr' in the query -Dr Zhivago- stands for Doctor whereas in -Rodeo Dr- it means Drive.
3. Understanding users: Google strives on providing highly relevant results for each and every user query. This work starts with a world class localization system, and adds to it our advanced personalization technology, and several other great strides we have made in interpreting user intent, e.g. Universal Search. Personalization is yet another Google's user oriented feature. For those users, who have signed up for Web History and conduct searches while they are logged on, would get more relevant results than normal Google results.

Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR):

Another advancement in regards to user convenience is the development of Cross Language Information Retrieval or CLIR. According to Amit, CLIR allows users to first discover information that is not in their language, and then using Google's translation technology, we make this information accessible. I call this advance: give me what I want in any language.

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