Google's first Search Evangelist opens up

Adam Lasnik, Google’s first Search Evangelist, tells Vishnu Anand of CyberMedia News how webmasters can leverage from Google’s tools and vice versa. Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

Does Google have tools that help webmasters increase the reach of their websites to the desired audience?

On one hand, Google attempts to increase the experience of a user who uses Google to search and find what he/she is looking for. But we also engage heavily with webmasters and owners of websites around the world in order for them to fine tune how their pages are crawled, displayed and recorded.

Simply put, Google has tools that help webmasters help themselves, right from the basics of naming and annotation of pages to increasing page ranks and increasing crawls.

Google’s Webmaster Central is an amalgamation of these applications and features, with sections on help documentation, an official Google webmasters’ blog, a help forum where webmasters around the world can post, reply and view comments and questions, and a feedback mechanism where Google takes inputs from the global webmaster community.

How does Google understand exactly what the search user is looking for from his/her query?

Let me explain this with an example. If you search for a word like 'cricket', and the query comes from an IP address in India, it is almost certain that you are looking for information about the sport in contrast to an American user, who could well be interested in information about the insect with the same name.

Google understands the geo-location of the search user. Another example is the word 'Jaguar'. Irrespective of where I’m located in the world, Google has the understanding that I have been searching on cars since a long time and it is highly probable that I am not looking for information on the animal.

This is Google’s understanding of your search history. We put geo-location and search history under a common blanket called Intent. From a webmaster’s perspective, he/she has the option of specifying the geographical boundaries of the site.

If the site has Indian content exclusively for views from Indian audiences, he/she has the option of specifying so and Google will ensure that it gets better attention of Indian searchers.

There are a lot of companies, in India and outside, that rely heavily on websites to sustain and improve their business. During times of economic uncertainties, can Google help companies target their reach better?

Fine tuning your site can go a long way in enhancing reach, gaining user loyalty and help Google reach your content to the right places. A webmaster today can suggest to Google, depending on the nature of the site, the frequency at which the site needs to be crawled.

If the website is a news resource that is updated every single day, Google can ‘crawl’ the content every day in contrast to a company homepage, which is intended to give information about the location, nature of business etc.

Webmasters need to understand that Google operates on two core principles – importance and relevance. Importance is the accuracy of the search query with keywords on your site, while relevance is the context in which the information is displayed.

It is also important to note here that Google does take sites out of its index if keywords are repeated more often than acceptable norms, which amounts to spamming.

Going forward, what’s on Google’s road map to increase user experience and enable webmasters put out quality content?

While Google has successfully incorporated geo-locations and past history analysis to our search DNA, we have work on the authorship front.

What we mean by authorship is this: There could be content on a particular site, which is high on quality and the individual or group that generates content for the site is highly respectable and honored. The site may not have a high page ranking, but if Google understands that the content generated by this site could be relevant and of high quality, we should be able to give it the exposure it needs. Hence, authorship and trust will be on our road map.

As we speak, Google gives to its users, an option called Search Wiki, which allows users to ‘promote’, ‘remove’ or comment on web results. For instance, if you search on A.R.Rahman and do not want to see the link from a certain unofficial fan site, you can delete the site from your results list.

Google will work on more such initiatives to make search easier, better and more focused to the user, and aid webmasters reach out their content to the right people.