This article just showed up on the front page of Digg. It is from the New York Times and has a rarely seen inside look at Google’s search ranking unit also known as “search quality.”

I have long abandoned reading the endless forum discussions and blogs about search engine optimization. (Besides simply not having the time, focusing on advertising and promotion has proven to be far more profitable.)

Sick of Matt Cutts? This article refers to some of the real Google puppetmasters including Amit Singhal and Udi Manber. If you want to know who they are, read the article.

“Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls “signals.” PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages — like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years.”