Around 2,500 technical documents detailing the nuts and bolts of Google's ranking algorithms have apparently leaked. If the documents are real, it's an unprecedented look into the workings of the utterly dominant internet search engine. And one hell of an error, because it is stated that Google itself published the documents to GitHub before taking them down. But nothing published to the web disappears overnight, and the documents have been kept for posterity elsewhere.
This leak provides an interesting opportunity to compare the reality of how Google ranks its search results with the various claims the company has made about what has hitherto been largely a mysterious black box. The inner workings of Google Search have long been speculated upon but never really known outside of the company itself—or indeed inside the company by most Google employees.
