Today's question comes from San Francisco, California.
And the question is, why does Google continue to present
multiple results from one domain on a search result?
Does it really benefit the user to have seven
results from Yelp?
OK.
This is a really interesting question.
I want to go ahead and cover it in depth and give a
timeline, because of all the questions that people ask,
this was one of the topics that bubbled up amongst a lot
of different questions.
So I want to make sure I cover it well.
In the early days, we had no restrictions at all.
We would completely score things.
And if we saw antique green glass ranking from one domain,
you could get tons and tons of results all from one domain.
And that was kind of a bad experience.
And so we introduced something called host clustering.
Host clustering means for each hostname, so like per
subdomain, you only get two results.
And it was interesting because we then saw people, spammers,
a bunch of different webmasters, adapt and say OK,
do a bunch of different subdomains.
And then you can get two results from one hostname, two
results from another hostname, two results
from another hostname.
And they can get back to crowding up the whole results
page again.
So we changed things again, because we do want diversity
in our search results.
And we made it such that, OK, you can get one result from a
domain and another result from a domain, and then
progressively new results from that same domain get harder
and harder for them to rank.
So if the only good results are on a certain domain, then
sure, you might see a lot of results from that one
particular site again.
But otherwise, you'd see a little bit more diversity, one
or two results, maybe three, possibly four.
But then you'd see results from other domains.
And that was pretty good.
And that was the world that a lot of people were used to.
And then we made another change not too long ago,
within the last couple years, that basically said, look, if
somebody's searching for rental cabins in Tennessee and
there's a really good website about that, something that we
think really matches the query very well, then it might be
helpful instead of only showing a few results from
that domain to show more results from that domain.
As we've seen, a few people are unhappy about that,
because if you're looking for a nursing care home in the
United Kingdom and you only get results from one or two
domains, then a lot of people felt like we weren't returning
the diversity that we should.
And so we actually made a change that made it such that
on the first results page, you'd be a little more likely
to see diversity.
And we weren't as worried about the second or the third
results page.
And so a lot of the complaints that I've seen in the last few
months have actually been along the lines of, do this
search for jobs in India or wherever, and click to page
three, and then you'll see a lot of
results from one domain.
And on one hand, I understand that that could be
frustrating.
On the other hand, if something happens on page two,
three, or four, fewer people are seeing it and so it's not
considered quite as much of a crisis or something that we're
really worried about.
However, it was kind of interesting.
We saw enough questions-- there were at least four or
five questions out of the 337 that we've seen so far that
asked about this specific topic.
So I went back and I found a complaint that people had done
from a few months ago where the result was a cluster of
results all from one domain and it was on page three.
And I dropped an email to the engineer in charge and said,
hey, people are still kind of unhappy about this.
Is there any new update?
And he replied back by email that there was a new update.
And so this hasn't launched yet.
But it has been approved by the quality
launch committee meetings.
And it's in the process of rolling out relatively soon.
And it basically says, once you've seen a cluster of, say,
four results from a given domain, as you click on
subsequent pages, we won't show you results from that
domain again.
So that should help improve the diversity.
We might still show multiple results from one domain if we
think it's a really good match for that query.
But at least you hopefully won't see it over and over and
over again as you dig deeper in the search results.
So it's always an ongoing balance.
We want to have diversity on one hand.
And on the other hand, if there are really good results
from one particular authority on the web, we want to return
the results from that authority as well.
The main thing I want to say is, this does continue to
evolve over time.
And I do appreciate the feedback.
All the people who either send me a tweet or drop me an email
or send me a screenshot and say, hey, this is a bad search
result, that's really helpful, because I can forward that on
to one particular engineer in this case or to a team if
people are worried that titles are not
being computed correctly.
And we do listen to the feedback.
And we try to improve things.
So I think that we'll have a little bit of a better set of
search results regarding this particular topic in a pretty
quick timeframe.
But keep sending us feedback, because that just helps us
make better search results for everybody.