SEO Headlines 27/01/12

This week's SEO news in brief: Insider info from Google worker, DuckDuckGo grows, and Google suggests you ask a friend instead.

Interview with a Google Insider

Search Engine Land managed to secure an interview with an anonymous Google Search Quality Rater. We’ve known of these mysterious Google employees since 2005 but never really understood them, until now. The interview reveals that raters see two versions of results pages, supposedly the product of variations in the search algorithm. The raters’ job is to select which would be more useful to that particular search query. They are also given many other tasks including rating a website as Vital, Useful, Relevant and Off-Topic or Useless in relation to various search terms.

New search engine gains 0.1% market share

Relatively new search engine DuckDuckGo (started late 2008), with a philosophy emphasizing privacy, has recorded its best performance to date, nearing 800,000 searches in one day. Though small in terms of market share, its popularity is growing rapidly, with usage increasing by around 75% in 3 months.

Search suggests “ask friends on Google+”

Google+ is getting even more promotion with some users seeing search results pages ending with the sentence “Want to ask your friends about [whatever you searched for]? Ask on Google+”.

Average search rank position report improved

If you’ve been looking at your website’s “average search rank” in Google Webmaster Tools or the new Analytics, you have probably been getting a bad impression of your results. The reason is, if you were lucky enough to have your website listed several times in the results, you would be given the average of those results, not just the top result. So if your site ranked #1 and had a second placement at #30, your average rank would display as #15. The update will make fix that and count only your highest rank.