Matthew reports of his experiences interviewing for a job at Google. Here's an interesting bit:

<<When I was going through the interviews, one of the interviewers (and I hope I’m not out of line here) actually spoke about the fact that Google pulls together information from heaps of different resources (blogs, forums etc) on a regular basis and tries to quantitatively (from qualitative signals) assess 'webmaster sentiment' – and use it as an early warning system to alert them if things (like an algorithm change for instance) have had any unforseen impact. That made me sit back and go 'wow'.>>

http://www.utheguru.com/my-recent-interview-with-google

Hi Philipp!

I'll correct a small misconception there – my impression was that the monitoring is manual – ie – real googlers at real desks actually read real blogs and come up with real impressions about what is really being said ;)

Cheers,

Matt

Well ... the system doesn't seem to have alerted them to the increasing unease over censorship. Or maybe that's not an "unforseen" impact.

> my impression was that the monitoring is manual

Ah OK. I guess something in my brain is wired to assume Google is always doing things with algorithms not humans :)
I heard of other companies having "Online Analysts" as employees, who go through all kinds of blogs to collect feedback. I've also seen Microsoft-internal mailings being circulated with nothing but summaries of breaking news from mainstream & blog sources alike.

> I guess something in my brain is wired to assume Google is always doing things with algorithms not humans

Hehe – well. I think they're certainly LOOKING to go that way – take the google webmaster help forums, for instance – traffic on them has been growing relatively exponentially over the last 6 months – at the mo we (ocassionally) get some googler input on there – but it seems less and less.

Google's buzz word is 'scalability' and if they can develop algorithms to 'take the temp' you can bet they will – but I did get the impression that employees are constantly readers – and I don't think there is any algorithm that can adequately measure the complete context of articles just yet.

Take the old classic – 'time flies like an arrow' – it can be interpreted in any number of ways depending upon the words around it.

I don't think that their employees are going to be replaced with algorithms any time soon – at least not in that field.

Cheers – Matt

Collecting the different sources of information would be pretty easy. Google could use their own Google Alerts feature to monitor News, Blogs and Google Groups for any chatter on one of their products or services.

Also, Mihai Parparita, a member of the Google Reader team talks about how Google creates bug reports for Google reader.

"Both WebKit's and Mozilla's Bugzilla instances support generating RSS feeds from search results. By subscribing to feeds for bugs that mention your product name, you can stay on top of such bug reports."

http://blog.persistent.info/2007/03/two-web-development-tips.html

I want some old pages from my site removed off the internet, They were changed but the old content stilll comes up on a google search.

Susan
If you need to remove cached pages you can use the tips provided in the link below:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35306

Or if you need to remove pages from Google's index, you can use this help page:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35301&ctx=sibling

Hope this helps.