"We’re lucky to have the criticism, because that means people care enough to tell us what they want."<p>That's a winning attitude in a competitive business. Because the Google team mentioned search results for medical terms in the interview, I tried out a few searches on medical terms that a few months put appallingly bad sites at or near the top of the results page. Now Google is serving up much better sites on medical topics, so I'm glad that algorithm change was made.
There are lots of very interesting things in this post - one of the most interesting long term changes I see is that Google are now admitting that you can lobby for algorithm changes.<p>I can imagine in another 12 months there will be vocal lobby groups to get Google to change parts of their algorithm for certain types of sites. This feels like the start of Google coming out of their shell and admitting that they listen to communities like HN and will respond with large scale algorithm updates.<p>I'd also dearly dearly love to know what this breakthrough was:<p>"Amit Singhal: Well, we named it internally after an engineer, and his name is Panda. So internally we called a big Panda. He was one of the key guys. He basically came up with the breakthrough a few months back that made it possible."
It's also interesting how they admit that the results can be gamed if you know what the changes they've made are. While that's most likely always been the case with Google's algorithm (any search algorithm, really), it's interesting that they're publicly saying it.