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 at one of my E-E-A-T posts 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. It must be a scale of 0-1. Is the general quality of Wikipedia high in terms of matching satisfaction? Their links are often high in organic rankings for informational search intent queries because 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, as it is after all User Generated Content (UGC) yet moderated too by all the Wikipedians. But for the most popular content they must work harder to maintain quality there, right? Also if as they state 1 point is equal to two Wikipedia’s content, then surely Wikipedia is a good benchmark? And who else is worth 0.5 points, who’s worth more, and if the rest of us are all so much less, how low does the IS Point value go? 0.001% or 0.0001% or even lower? Where’s the bottom?
Whatever the answers are, and I may be way off the mark, the fact that there’s an internal Google score, the IS point, that’s probably proprietary and I can’t find a public reference to define it means that I’d love to know more. Maybe I should conduct some deep research into google patents?
Next Steps
IS Points or not, if you need help doing SEO on your website, let me know. I can help you with SEO audits, getting in place an SEO strategy, and critically set up all the essential SEO tools. You can secure my services on an SEO retainer too. Call me on 01252 692 765 or leave a message via my contact form.