What is this leaked Google code? Browse the API docs

What is this leaked Google code? Browse the API docs

Well, this has been an interesting week. Rand Fishkin published a fascinating article about a number of documents that was shared with him. These documents contain documentation for API calls to Google’s Cloud Content Warehouse. There is speculation, with good reason, that this documentary can help us learn a lot about Google’s search systems.

Here are the documents:

https://hexdocs.pm/google_api_content_warehouse/0.4.0/api-reference.html#modules

There is also one Version 5.0 that is much shorter.

There is a mystery to this story. Here is the one video from the person who contacted Rand. Here is Article by Mike King with his thoughts on what we can learn from these documents. Every SEO should read this.

I have many questions about these files and believe there is so much we can learn. I’ll be learning a little every day and posting a series of blog posts as I go along.

These are not ranking algorithms. But we May be able to learn about ranking by studying them.

The files contain two lists. One contains attributes. And boy, there are some interesting ones. We’ll delve deeper into this in the coming days (ahahaha… it’s really me, not the AI), but first we need to understand what these even are and then speculate on how or even If They are used in the ranking.

What is this leaked Google code? Browse the API docs

The second list of documents contains information on what appears to be thousands Modules. They provide instructions to help developers connect to specific APIs (application programming interfaces) on Google’s cloud platform.

Google’s cloud platform is a set of services that enable companies to leverage Google’s infrastructure and machine learning models.

The files are called Google_API_Content_Warehouse.

so I googled Content warehouse and found this documentation. The Content Warehouse is a warehouse for documents that developers use to connect to Google’s AI.

This leads us to an important conclusion and is perhaps a good place to end this first part of our investigation:

These documents are not code used in Google’s systems. These are documents intended to help developers building on the cloud platform with Google’s AI.

Still, I think it’s worth spending more time on it.

Why I think it is important to study these documents

In April 2024 at Google’s Cloud Next keynoteThey announced that companies can now build on Google’s AI technology in a safer and more accurate manner. Tools designed to use Gemini are now possible based on Google search. This is important because grounding reduces the likelihood of AI distorting information.

based on Google search

A company can now use Google’s cloud platform to develop with Gemini and create products based on its data and also search.

This brings us to the question I want to answer at the end of this series:

Are the attributes mentioned in these API files attributes used in Google’s search ranking algorithms? And if so, what do we do with this information?

I believe the attributes are all things that can be used in Google’s calculations. Ranking is all about using math to make predictions about what is likely to be helpful to the searcher. It started with PageRank and over time Google has learned to use more signals than links and to do more calculations with machine learning algorithms. As they learn, these machine learning systems adjust how much weight they give to the individual signals (attributes?) they use.

I think studying attributes can help us learn more. There are a few mentioned that are related to NavBoost, including NavQuery, which uses Navboost query data. In fact, just looking at mentions of Navboost, it’s probably several blog posts! Clicks, also badClicks, are mentioned. There’s PagerankWeight – “the weight to be stored in link maps for page rankers.” There’s AnchorSpamPenalizer!?! And there are interesting things about the quality raters:

Quality rater in API documents

Here are the other posts in this series:

What are attributes? Browse the Google API docs

Navboost

Mary

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