Just a quick one to point out this post on the official Google blog by one of their ‘Google Fellows’, Amit Singhal. Of course it doesn’t dive too deep, but it is a good read if you are interested in the way Google works. I also find it interesting because it seems to signal an intent to be a bit more communicative with the marketplace…

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)…read more.

The post goes on to talk about one of my favorite topics, searcher intent, but one of the take aways for me was the reminder that Google not only has to solve the problem of indexing and understanding the content of pages on the web, but they also have to solve the problem of understanding search queries, which might be mispelled, have double meanings or be otherwise non-specific. Amit gives some great examples to illustrate these.