Big time for Google this month of May. After the rather disastrous deployment of AI Overviews across the Atlantic (these search results boosted by generative AI with sometimes crazy, even dangerous results, requiring Google to do some damage control manual), the firm was hit on May 28 by a major leak. It took Google several days to confirm the situation: no less than 2,500 pages of internal documents published and analyzed by SEO experts Rand Fishkin and Mike King are in the wild.
Opaque practices on the part of Google?
Above all technical, these documents notably lift the veil on the data collected by Google to feed the algorithm of its search engine, and on the numerous criteria taken into account for the referencing of websites. How and why are certain sites offered before others during a search? This is something that is of interest to many marketing departments and many people looking for influence on the Internet and its main search engine.
But where the problem lies is that these documents tend to show that Google’s browser, Chrome, is indeed used to collect user data in order to power the search engine, which Google has always denied. These documents could thus demonstrate the relative honesty of the firm regarding its practices, generally shrouded in secrecy.
Outdated and incomplete documents?
To try to limit the damage and mitigate the extent of the leak, Google communicated with various American media, including The Verge. The spokesperson for the firm declared in particular: “We caution against making inaccurate assumptions about how search works based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information.“The leaked documents may therefore not be complete, or even no longer fully correspond to the current state of the search engine.
The firm adds: “We’ve shared a lot of information about how research works and the types of factors our systems take into account, while working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.” It remains to be seen whether dishonest uses of this data will take place, and whether SEO specialists around the world will manage to learn something useful from this leak, before Google potentially changes the rules once again.