Google has yet to create an algorithm that approximates how the human mind processes things. They’re working on it, of course, but it is still a textual (as well as contextual and behavioral, and mathematical, among others) process rather than a pure cognitive process. And that creates a gap that is hard to navigate when writing for the Web: write for the reader or write for the spider?

VoIP company Skype experienced a massive outage due to a problem the company blamed on a deficient network software algorithm.

Hitwise reports that Google’s market share for May is 65.13%. While fielding nearly two thirds of all US searches is definitely not a bad thing, Google’s market share didn’t grow over April 2007. In fact, it actually declined 0.13 percentage points. While the amount is minuscule (representing 0.2% of their market share), for the first time in recent months, some of the other major search engines actually gained market share.

Ask.com has gotten a lot of flack over its “algorithm” ad campaign, and it seemed possible that the publicity might hurt, rather than help, the company.  Now one survey has revealed that many people didn’t even associate the ads with Ask.com – instead, they believed those strange and controversial messages were coming from Google.

Ok, so the New York Times doesn’t exactly get Google’s top algorithm execs to tell us how the search engine calculates search results, but they do get fresh insight as to how Google decides to update it’s technology.

The article includes interviews with Amit Singhal, Matt Cutts and Udi Manber.

Insights include details of Google’s internal system for evaluating search queries, called Debug.

Jim Lanzone and company want to own the mindshare for the word ‘algorithm’ as their massive advertising campaign to promote that and Ask’s brand continues.

Perhaps Google’s algorithm isn’t as difficult as we all think?

No, I haven’t been sitting in front of the microwave for too long again. Before you rip me to pieces, give me a few seconds to explain myself!

Possible Technology Limitations

Now, we all know that Google has one of the largest server farms in the world, estimated upwards of 250,000 individual servers spread worldwide. In spite of this fact, many people lost sight of the fact that Google only has a finite (albeit large) amount or resources.

Matt Cutts confirmed in comments at Search Engine Land exactly what I’ve suspected, that Google defuses Google bombs by using specific code designed to do so.