Design for users

Gary Illyes has a very dry way of saying no. When I caught him at Big Digital Adelaide, I asked what Google wanted from publishers. He said he'd hope they "try hard to create high quality sites instead of trying to sell Viagra in a Canadian casino without prescription." A minute later, on buying links: "going out and buying five thousand links from a Russian spammer, it's not a good idea in general, but sure, it could work for a few hours."

A few hours. And that's from a man who works on the thing you're trying to trick.

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   Design for users

   Build for the person doing the search, and let Google worry about the rankings.

   "Focus on the user, try to answer the user, try to satisfy the user, and all else will follow."

   Gary IllyesS01E05 Hear it 3:41

   > focused on the user so hard my lens fogged.

Earlier in that answer he said Google's goal "was always to provide the most relevant results to our users and that hasn't changed." So his advice for the rest of us was to focus on the user.

The machine keeps getting closer to the person

Every year the gap between what a person means and what Google understands gets smaller. Gary's examples, the word "without" and his python on Kangaroo Island, are in understand the context. When the machine is chasing the person that hard, optimising for the machine means aiming at where it used to be. Google's own guidance on people-first content now spells it out: "People-first content means content that's created primarily for people, and not to manipulate search engine rankings."

Don't try to game the clicks

In the episode, Gary's answer follows a clip of Larry Kim at 8:23 arguing that machine learning systems watch whether searchers are satisfied and adjust rankings to match. Gary wasn't having it. He said people should "stick to what they are experts on", and then, at 11:46, that "clicks in general are a very noisy signal." Between scrapers and bots clicking on things, he called click data a Gordian knot.

I'm not going to referee that one. Either way, the person who clicked either found what they wanted or went back and tried someone else. If there's anything on your site that only exists for rankings, like a stuffed paragraph or a footer full of keywords, start deleting there.

Speed is a user feature

Design for users isn't only about words. Gary told me at 19:43 that his favourite news site took "probably like twenty seconds" to load in Australia, even on 4G, because the data had to cross oceans to reach him. Anyone who's browsed from Adelaide knows the feeling. Google later made that frustration official with Page Experience and Core Web Vitals, but the user felt it long before any ranking factor did.

Google is a library

At the end of the episode I tried to explain how I describe Google to clients. At 26:03 I called it a big library, where every website is a book and some are more like magazines. What you want is "a huge corpus of work" and more citations. Google started at Stanford, after all. Build something people want to borrow and something worth linking to, and the librarian tends to notice.

Gary's full interview is on kwasi.com.