Google accidentally published internal Search documentation to GitHub

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Alexander Koerner)

Google apparently accidentally posted a big stash of internal technical documents to GitHub, partially detailing how the search engine ranks webpages. For most of us, the question of search rankings is just “are my web results good or bad,” but the SEO community is both thrilled to get a peek behind the curtain and up in arms since the docs apparently contradict some of what Google has told them in the past. Most of the commentary on the leak is from SEO experts Rand Fishkin and Mike King.

Google confirmed the authenticity of the documents to The Verge, saying, “We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information. We’ve shared extensive information about how Search works and the types of factors that our systems weigh, while also working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.”

The fun thing about accidentally publishing to the GoogleAPI GitHub is that, while these are sensitive internal documents, Google technically released them under an Apache 2.0 license. That means anyone who stumbled across the documents was granted a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license” to them, so these are freely available online now, like here.