Google and Transparency

Let me preface this post with a clear disclaimer: I work at Google, but the views I express on this blog are my own personal views.

Last week, Google head of webspam Matt Cutts posted a full-throated defense of Google’s transparency on Google’s European Policy Blog in response to complaints that a few companies raised to the European Commission. Long-time readers of my blog know that I’m a big fan of search engine transparency and have made my own calls on this blog for Google to be more transparent. The fact that I work at Google now doesn’t change my values. But being on the inside has informed my perspective.

In particular, as Matt elaborates in his post, Google deserves more credit for transparency than it often gets from its critics. For example, Google has published:

• “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine“, which not only details the formula for PageRank, but also mentions other signals that Google uses to rank search results: anchor text, location of query terms within documents, proximity of query terms, etc.
• details of its key infrastructure innovations…

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