BW looks inside Google

Robert Hof asks "Can Google Stay on Top of the Web?" in this week's BusinessWeek. Google seems to have offered Hof more access to their inner workings than most reporters. Most interesting to me was his description of the evolutionary, detail-focused way that Google makes many of its search results improvements:

To an outsider, many of the changes may look impossibly trivial. Several years ago, for instance, engineers noticed that while Google was returning useful pages when someone typed an acronym such as 'CIA'—providing links to the government agency and to the Culinary Institute of America—people were taking a slightly longer time than expected to click on one of them. So on the results pages, Google began highlighting in bold the full names. Immediately, Google saw more clicks through to pages—and faster, too. How much faster? Perhaps 30 or 40 thousandths of a second, on average, Singhal says. That's one tenth the speed of an eyeblink. 'This was a small idea,' concedes Singhal. 'But we have a real responsibility as a company to respect people's time.'

In doing research for the article, Hof held in-depth interviews with Eric Schmidt along with 4 key people in Google's search quality group. You can find links to each of those interviews on Matt Cutts' blog.