This morning I was reading a fascinating post about an alleged deterioration in the quality of Google Search.
Titled Google Quality Issues: Part of an Intentional Strategy? the piece critiques Google’s search quality, particularly for certain financial queries. I won’t go into those now because my attention was caught at the very first piece of evidence WalletHub provided.
In the section titled “Google has known for years that significantly reducing quality would not hurt the business in a significant way.” the article says the following about “internal quality studies”…
What caught my attention toon was the mention of “IS points”. The reason for this is that I was thinking about E-E-A-T the other day and wrote that I didn’t think there was a way to quantify E-E-A-T. Yet there must be a quantifier if Google consider quality raters’ opinions of web pages and whether they benefit from passing “needs met” (NM) or not.
This mention of “IS points” was just a timely mention considering I was looking back on E-E-A-T only yesterday.
In the context of the snippet in the article, which references an official legal document in a case about Google’s search engine monopoly ruling, the “IS point” appears to be an internal measure of search quality at Google. Explaining that a drop of 1 IS point represents a significant degradation in search quality, equivalent to losing twice the information contained in Wikipedia, I wondered what an IS point is.
Well, what if it’s an “information satisfaction point”? Could that be related to the value of the NM in the Quality Raters Guidelines (QRG).
Of course, we don’t know what the scale is and if 1 IS point is the equivalent to ALL of Wikipedia, then it can’t be 1 in 100. Is the general quality of Wikipedia high in terms of matching satisfaction? Their links are often high in organic rankings for information Stil Al intent searched d as bd there is a high degree of trust in the brand is there not?
So maybe 1 IS point is the top of the scale? 0.1 might be just 10% satisfaction, 1 could refer to 100%
I’ve heard criticisms levelled at Wikipedia and seen poor quality content at times, but for the most popular content they must work harder to maintain quality there, right?
Whatever the answers are, and I may be way off the mark, the fact that there’s an internal Google score that’s probably proprietary and I can’t find a public reference to define it means that I’d love to know more.