Google Search Quality

Not that long ago Google started revealing a bit more about their search quality updates.  They haven’t revealed everything (and why should they?) but what they have been giving us has been pretty great thus far.  Every month Google makes a series of changes which some agree with and others cry about.  In January Google had 17 search quality changes but we wanted to just talk about some of them.

  • Fresher results. [launch codename “nftc”] We made several adjustments to the freshness algorithm that we released in November. These are minor updates to make sure we continue to give you the freshest, most relevant results.

A little while ago Google made a significant effort in increasing the effectiveness of time-sensitive queries.  This is important for those who often write about recent events.

  • Faster autocomplete. [launch codename “Snappy Suggest”, project codename “Suggest”] We made improvements to our autocomplete system to deliver your predicted queries much faster.
  • Autocomplete spelling corrections. [launch codename “Trivial”, project codename “Suggest”] This is an improvement to the spelling corrections used in autocomplete, making those corrections more consistent with the spelling corrections used in search. This launch targets corrections where the spelling change is very small.
  • Better spelling full-page replacement. [launch codenames “Oooni”, “sgap”, project codename “Full-Page Replacement”] When we’re confident in a spelling correction we automatically show results for the corrected query and let you know we’re “Showing results for [cheetah]” (rather than, say, “cheettah”). We made a couple of changes to improve the accuracy of this feature.
  • High-quality sites algorithm improvements. [launch codenames “PPtl” and “Stitch”, project codename “Panda”] In 2011, we launched the Panda algorithm change, targeted at finding more high-quality sites. We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines. We also released a minor update to refresh the data for Panda.

Google continues to refine their search tool more and every month which they have begun to share with the community even more than ever before. It is important to understand that Google is always changing and with those changes come massive fluctuations in search results which is just fine if you are marketing your business website using multiple avenues.

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