Google’s Three Core Ranking Philosophies: A 2024 Update

Back in 2008, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google, wrote about the company’s three core ranking philosophies. However, technology has advanced quite a bit in the past 16 years, so there are new things to take into account when considering this advice. Google has always emphasized delivering the most relevant information to searchers, yet these core philosophies have remained the same:

1. Best Locally Relevant Results Served Globally

2. Keep It Simple

3. No Manual Intervention

Let’s take a closer look at what each of these means in today’s context and how they can better serve your digital marketing efforts.

1. Best Locally Relevant Results Served Globally

Amit Singhal emphasized in this philosophy that “no query [is] left behind.” Simply put, this means that Google is always working to provide you with the most relevant search results based on your location and intent, whether you’re searching for a local eatery or even staying up to date on global news.

Within 2024, Google has even introduced AI and machine learning to aid in search results and refine its algorithm to help improve the user experience. Tools like the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) allow Google to better understand queries while taking context, location, and language into account with a little more nuance.

Essentially, each user has a tailored experience that learns as it goes and enhances the algorithm both locally and globally, which means it’s even more important to understand SEO in digital marketing to cater to these new technologies and systems. These improvements help both customers and businesses across different categories and languages, which is a big leap from the 2008 experience of a Google search.

2. Keep It Simple

Google, much like its customers, loves simplicity and clarity, which is why this core philosophy has stayed the same. Amt Singhal said in his 2008 blog, “Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query.”

Despite the boost in complex search technologies (including AI-based improvements like MUM), Google aims to keep its core system understandable and transparent to maintain the search algorithm’s high-quality performance while still facilitating innovation.

3. No Manual Intervention

One FAQ from Google users is, “Does the company manually edit search results?” And the answer is no. Google’s algorithms play a big role in extracting information and encoding web pages and links to create objective rank results. This is because the company believes subjective judgment can be flawed, and algorithms are better able to distill the collective knowledge of the web.

Rest assured, however, that human intervention is still used to remove search results that go against Google guidelines, such as spammy or malicious content. And now, Google utilizes AI-driven systems to identify and categorize problematic queries.

Navigating These Timeless Principles in a Modern Age