Google Ranking (is not at all) Explained

A headline on Search Engine Watch a couple of days ago proudly proclaimed, "Google Ranking (Partly) Explained." "Wow!" I thought, "Not only are they giving us search volumes for keywords now, they're starting to explicitly explain how they rank sites?"

Well No -  actually they're not.

Well, they are if you live in the land of magic where science is a mystery and logic doesn't function. Google have added a post on the Official Google Blog where they explain that they aim to rank sites that are most relevant, that their algorithm is simple enough for their engineers to understand (not the reverse where their engineers are clever enough to understand their very complex algorithm, something far more impressive) and that they believe in using the way humans link between sites and describe sites to put the editorial judgement into ranking so their algorithm is always automatic and they don't have to do any manual editing of the search results.

Call me crazy,  but this isn't news. This isn't remotely new information. Any search marketing novice will have gathered this in the first day of their training, or at least I hope they will. And this certainly does not reveal anything about how Google really ranks sites that is more enlightening than the term "Don't be evil."