The One Bit of Info Google Withholds: How It Works

Google "is the big kid in the schoolyard," said Andy Beal, chief executive of Fortune Interactive, an online marketing firm that works with Google and other search engines. "It makes the rules, and it reserves the right to change the rules. But there's only so long it can continue to do that before the other kids say, 'We're not going to play with them anymore.' "

All search companies are secretive. But as the largest and most idiosyncratic, Google has drawn the most scrutiny.

Google executives say they are trying to operate more transparently.

"Google's concluded that our interests as a company are better served by being more open about what we are doing, and what we aren't," Elliot Schrage, Google's vice president of global communications and public affairs, said at the start of the company's annual meeting for media and analysts May 10.

"Of course," he quickly added, "there are limits."

He and other Google executives acknowledge that there is much internal debate over where to draw that line. How does Google shake the mantle of being so mysterious without giving an edge to competitors and those trying to game the search rankings?

"It's a very good question," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said. "I don't know how to answer it."

After all, Google has some very good reasons for keeping parts of its business secret.

A top ranking in the search results has become such valuable online real estate that an entire industry has sprung up to try to boost websites. But Google's popularity depends on its ability to deliver relevant search results. Bogus results could drive away users. So Google has kept its ranking formula -- which the company says includes more than 200 signals -- more secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola.

Google also is locked in a battle with deep-pocketed competitors, including Yahoo and Microsoft Corp., which would be happy to use Google's secrets in their own favor.

It was discretion that allowed the company a few years ago to sneak up on those Internet giants, whose executives had little idea how profitable search-related ads could be until 2004, when Google's decision to go public forced it to begin revealing its finances.

Consumers had already been dazzled by Google's search engine for years, with little idea of how it worked. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the core technology as graduate students at Stanford University. They said it ranked results by analyzing the links to a website to determine its relative importance, but they -- and their competitors -- have remained vague to keep people from artificially raising their sites' rankings.