The New York Times on Monday had an interesting inside look at those whose job it is to tend Google’s Golden Goose: search.
The gist was that despite all of the fancy bells and whistles that keep Google in the news every day, it’s search that pays the bills.
Now Google blogger Matt Cutts has chimed in about the story in a post entitled “Five things you didn’t know about Google search”:
To be completely honest, I was a little worried about Saul Hansell, a journalist for the New York Times, sitting in on some of our confidential quality meetings at Google. Even though everything was off-the-record, you can’t help but be slightly nervous talking about evaluation methodologies and confidential projects with a reporter in the room. You can read the article now, and in my opinion it does a good job of describing search quality at Google.
I think it was worth the risk of letting a journalist attend our quality meetings. To see why, I’ll highlight five things from the article that you might not have known.
There’s always the risk of puffery when a journalist is granted such inside access – especially to a tight-lipped outfit like Google – and it’s not surprising that the article is being met with approval within the company. All in all, though, both the story and the analysis by Cutts are worth a look for Google watchers.
