Earlier this week, Google Fellow Amit Singhal gave the opening keynote at SMX London. Although Matt Cutts has always been the public face of all parts of Google’s unpaid search, his realm is primarily web spam. Singhal has been speaking publicly more often (notably when Panda launched) and oversees search quality. Or, as he described in his talk, when he came to Google in 2000, he took a look at Sergey Brin’s code and entirely rewrote Google’s ranking algorithm.

Near the end of the talk, someone asked if how much money Google will make is factored into decisions about changes to Google’s (unpaid search algorithms). Singhal was adamant: “no revenue measurement is included in our evaluation of a rankings change.” Listening to him explain how excites he gets about search improvements and how changes are evaluated, you realize there’s no spin here. He’s absolutely telling the truth. And he would know. Chris Sherman asked if anyone at Google really understands...