Google Explains How It Processes Queries & Ranks Content

Google’s Gary Illyes published an new How Search Works video that gave an inside look into how search queries are interpreted and ranked. Later in the video he refines the meaning of the word relevance by emphasizing relevance to the user, which is different than plain semantic relevance. Search Query ParsingGary next moves on to the first step of how Google ranks webpages which is by interpreting the search query, which begins with cleaning up the search query by removing stop words, identifying entities that need stop words, and query expansion. As I mentioned earlier, many SEOs focus on semantic relevance but the part about relevance to the user is super important because search queries have multiple meanings and contexts that go beyond semantic relevance. Search FeaturesGoogle shows many different kinds of search features and Gary Illyes says that they’re query dependent, meaning that different queries trigger different features.