Over the weekend, Boston Globe and The Times ran articles on Google. The
Globe piece emphasised the notion of third parties developing applications that work on the Google platform and how Google supports that using environments like
Gears. The
other piece focused on how Google tweaks the search algorithm to produce better results. What is amazing is that there are over 200 signals that Google uses to tune the search results.
While it may seem like these two strategies are contradictory, they are highly interrelated. Relevance is very important in providing high quality search results. In order to tweak its search algorithms, Google needs more and more user/usage data. This data comes from both the search queries and from using Google products like Gmail, Orkut, GoogleMaps and others. To keep developing useful products, Google is contantly testing multiple products in parallel. It is impossible for Google to develop all of them internally. As a result, they make it easy (by providing APIs and development environments like Geas) for third parties to create new applications but capture the data on usage.