Schmidt will be answering claims that Google’s business practices are anti-competitive today at a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC. Just as all witnesses are required to do, he has something written that was submitted to the subcommittee prior to his appearance today. The subcommittee has released that PDF document , which contains interesting details about how Google tests those algorithm changes.

As quoted from Schmidt’s document:

“To give you a sense of the scale of the changes that Google considers, in 2010 we conducted 13,311 precision evaluations to see whether proposed algorithm changes improved the quality of its search results, 8,157 side-by-side experiments where it presented two sets of search results to a panel of human testers and had the evaluators rank which set of results was better, and 2,800 click evaluations to see how a small sample of real-life Google users responded to the change. Ultimately, the process resulted in 516 changes that were determined to be useful to users based on the data and, therefore, were made to Google’s algorithm. Most of these changes are imperceptible to users and affect a very small percentage of websites, but each one of them is implemented only if we believe the change will benefit our users.”

This kind of testing is a part of the reason that Google’s quality of search results are so much better than the other engines out there. It’s also why we can continue to expect more and more algorithm updates from Google going forward.

The Related bar will stay minimized unless you hover over. You do have the option to disable it if you don’t want it popping up. The option to disable Related or hide the tool for specific Web sites is available in the options menu.

Data collected via Related is similar to how Google collects search information. According to Google, the Related extension operates by sending Google certain information about your machine and web sites at the time you visit them, including the URL of the web site, your machine’s IP address, and one or more Google cookies. This data is retained in Google’s server logs and maintained according to our general Privacy Policy.

Click on the image to view a larger screenshot and you can get a better idea.This brings more importance to having a website optimized for organic search results, video, images and Google locals as those are the links that show up in the Google Related toolbar.

You can watch a video on Google Related here:

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