I'm the person they talked to. I work for the search quality team. I report directly to the head of the search quality team. We don't somehow not rank a site because it has "old" content. We do, conversely, reward fresh *pages* rather than *sites* if a query itself seems to warrant showing fresh content. We explain this more in our documentation here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide#freshness

Newer stuff absolutely does not always rise above older stuff. This is easily verifiable by anyone who wants to try some searches that have no particular freshness aspect that would be expected to be associated with them.

I totally get that sometimes, people do want explicitly older content when we might show newer content. That's why we created the before: and after: operators to help. You'll find more about them here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272

I work for Google Search (I'm the one quoted in the article) If you use quotes, we won't drop terms. Happy to look into your example if you can recall the query. If you didn't use quotes, we might have transposed because the digits transposed are very similar to some other digit-related query. That's how spelling correct similarly works. When it work as you want, it's great. When we get it wrong, understandably annoying. We try not to get it wrong, so would love to pass the example along.

I work for Google; I'm the person who shared this information. The translation isn't correct, because it's confusing indexing (the process of being included for possible ranking) and ranking (whether something actually shows up in response to a query). IE: the story is straight.

The primary question in all this has been about ranking. Does getting rid of "old" content somehow cause our systems to see a site overall as "fresh" and rank it better. No, it will not. That's what my initial tweet was about: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800

The follow up question I was asked was about covered both ranking and indexing separately:
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129

The *ranking* response was that the page might not rank well. The additional response was about indexing -- that maybe if you remove the page, we potentially might index other pages from a site if a site is really large, etc. That doesn't mean the other page will rank well. It doesn't mean the site is somehow now "fresh" and overall ranks better. The ranking story is no different.

You're funny. I don't understand the internet. Um, I've been using it since 1994. That long enough for you? Been writing about search since before there was a Google. And trolled? What on earth are you talking about. I wrote a story for my readers, on my site. Someone submits it over here. Didn't ask for that to happen. Didn't encourage it. Don't even know it had happened. And that's trolling Slashdot?

What the hell I want them to do was explained in the article:

"It shouldn’t be that hard for Google to police what shows up in response to what it publishes on Google Trends. Spam sites ought to be nabbed. AdSense sites ought to be shut down. News publishers abusing the very lucky position they have of being in Google News, by routinely tapping into Google Trends topics that aren’t relevant to their publications, should get the boot."

These aren't unreasonable things. These are things Google should be doing already, to ensure the quality of its results. It's failing to do that. That's the point of the article, to highlight how badly they're doing.

Spend some time on Google Trends, go to the news results that come up and start looking more closely at the "stories" you get. You'll see huge amounts of junk -- outright gibberish. That's not what the world's most popular search engine should be returning.

The point was in the opening paragraph of the story. Google's CEO complains that the web is full of garbage. But his own company helps generate that garbage by publishing breaking, popular topics and then failing to police the results that show up, which is handy because most of that garbage also carries ads from Google, which earns Google money.

Bing publishes trends like Google. So do many other search engines. But they don't have near the network of earning off the garbage that those trends generate, as Google does. And they don't have a CEO who complains that the web is a cesspool.

By the way, Search Engine Land is a site about search. A respected site. A site that is granted interviews with Google routinely, including one with Schmidt himself last year, where I talked with him about the "sewage" issue. Do a search for "Google CEO Eric Schmidt On Newspapers & Journalism" and you'll get that long interview. I don't want to drop a link and hit some spam filter here.

SEO is part of search, as is the quality of search results. This story was hating on Google, and Google had that coming to it. It was returning stories that were simply embarrassing to it, given the amount of effort it has been doing recently to talk about how great its search results are -- over and above the usual efforts it does. But I understand this, because that's my job. I track Google regularly.

It has nothing to do with a competitor. Most of the "news" sites I wrote about aren't news sites at all, and I'm hardly trying to bring in visitors by writing about candy bars.