Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real

This is my magnum opus in the series of the death of the internet themed threads.

About 2,500 search API documents from Google has leaked, and Google has confirmed it is real. It does not mean you could use that information to make your own Google, but it does mean there is going to be a new arms race in SEO spam. Google was becoming unusable before, and there is little hope that this leak won't be weaponized to render the search giant to be fully useless.

If you need some laughs, check out the Google Search AI fails:

https://arstechnica.com/information...-give-false-misleading-and-dangerous-answers/

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmation

Allegations from the leak include:

In their early years, Google’s search team recognized a need for full clickstream data (every URL visited by a browser) for a large percent of web users to improve their search engine’s result quality.

A system called “NavBoost” (cited by VP of Search, Pandu Nayak, in his DOJ case testimony) initially gathered data from Google’s Toolbar PageRank, and desire for more clickstream data served as the key motivation for creation of the Chrome browser (launched in 2008).

NavBoost uses the number of searches for a given keyword to identify trending search demand, the number of clicks on a search result (I ran several experiments on this from 2013-2015), and long clicks versus short clicks (which I presented theories about in this 2015 video).

Google utilizes cookie history, logged-in Chrome data, and pattern detection (referred to in the leak as “unsquashed” clicks versus “squashed” clicks) as effective means for fighting manual & automated click spam.

NavBoost also scores queries for user intent. For example, certain thresholds of attention and clicks on videos or images will trigger video or image features for that query and related, NavBoost-associated queries.

Google examines clicks and engagement on searches both during and after the main query (referred to as a “NavBoost query”). For instance, if many users search for “Rand Fishkin,” don’t find SparkToro, and immediately change their query to “SparkToro” and click SparkToro.com in the search result, SparkToro.com (and websites mentioning “SparkToro”) will receive a boost in the search results for the “Rand Fishkin” keyword.

NavBoost’s data is used at the host level for evaluating a site’s overall quality (my anonymous source speculated that this could be what Google and SEOs called “Panda”). This evaluation can result in a boost or a demotion.
Other minor factors such as penalties for domain names that exactly match unbranded search queries (e.g. mens-luxury-watches.com or milwaukee-homes-for-sale.net), a newer “BabyPanda” score, and spam signals are also considered during the quality evaluation process.

NavBoost geo-fences click data, taking into account country and state/province levels, as well as mobile versus desktop usage. However, if Google lacks data for certain regions or user-agents, they may apply the process universally to the query results.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Google employed whitelists for websites that could appear high in the results for Covid-related searches

Similarly, during democratic elections, Google employed whitelists for sites that should be shown (or demoted) for election-related information