Google Says No Manual Updates to Index… Yeah Right.

Today I saw an interview in Popular Mechanics with Google’s Guru of search: Udi Manber. It is extremely rare to see an interview with him so I was quite pleased when I stumbled upon it. There were some pretty interesting things in the article and I found one statement particularly interesting. He said “At Google we do not manually change results.” What’s that? Really? They say this all the time, but I just don’t believe it. I made a post on WebmasterWorld on 3/6 and also discussed it here. You can’t tell me that in a matter of about 30 minutes that they were able to tweak the algorithm, push it out to over 700 different datacenters, and have it go live. Google might be a technology giant, but I seriously doubt that even they can manipulate their index that quickly… unless of course, they do it by hand.
Anyway, here’s the full article.