There are many mysteries in life, does the Davinci code really exist, what came first, the chicken or the egg, why do men have nipples? Probably one of the greatest mysteries of recent times is how does Googles search algorithm work.

A recent post over at Boydcreative shows the code displayed when a query from one of googles data centres (64.233.183.104) went wrong. The code originates from a member on the Digital Point forums who captured the code below On 3rd July

pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-overall-sum 2341989
pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-total-count 7776761
cpu-utilization 1.28
cpu-speed 2800000000
timedout-queries_total 14227
num-docinfo_total 10680907
avg-latency-ms_total 3545152552
num-docinfo_total 10680907
num-docinfo-disk_total 2200918
queries_total 1229799558
e_supplemental=150000 –pagerank_cutoff_decrease_per_round=100 –pagerank_cutoff_increase_per_round=500 –parents=12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23 –pass_country_to_leaves –phil_max_doc_activation=0.5 –port_base=32311 –production –rewrite_noncompositional_compounds –rpc_resolve_unreachable_servers –scale_prvec4_to_prvec –sections_to_retrieve=body+url+compactanchors –servlets=ascorer –supplemental_tier_section=body+url+compactanchors –threaded_logging –nouse_compressed_urls –use_domain_match –nouse_experimental_indyrank –use_experimental_spamscore –use_gwd –use_query_classifier –use_spamscore –using_borg

Now it looks like a lit of gibberish but there are some interesting things in here.

Specifically use_query_classifier –use_spamscore –using_borg

This seems to indicate that Google does indeed use some form of anti spam feature to help reduce the number of instances where websites gain a high ranking by spamming other sites and blogs with cleverly placed keywords.

Goodness knows what the ‘using borg’ feature is all about though!

As more techies get onto this code we may well learn more about it. if the secrets do get out though I’m sure it won;t be to long before google re-write some or all of this code.