Google Search Quality: 50 Changes in March

Wednesday April 4, 2012 Category: SEO News & Updates

Google’s search quality department announced 50 important changes which took place in March this year.

Here’s the summary:

Symbols: Inclusion in autocomplete.
Symbols: Improved indexing.
News Results: Scoring system for news groups improved.
Sitelinks: Fresher and faster updates.
Autocomplete: Now takes up less resources to run (internal improvement).
Security: Change your password and you will now be logged out of all machines.
Index: Improvements in profile indexing and its comprehensiveness.
Universal Search: Design tweaks and improved user experience.
Search Query: More intelligent navigational search queries.
Panda: High quality site definitions re-processed and released live.
Sports: Scoring and schedules now in live updating snippets (UEFA & KHL)
Sports: Live scoring triggered by player or event name (Tennis)
Image Search: Page quality gains points in favour of image quality to improve relevance.
Image Search: All languages now included in fresher image predictions update.
Safe Search: No more embarrassing moments with smarter safe search.
Anchor Text: One classifier related to anchor text was turned off in order to improve quality of results.
Universal Search (Images): Simplified codebase and leverage of a global ranking system.
Mobile: Application ranking and UI improvements through richer results.
Universal Search (Video): Improved detection of stale videos and improved freshness.
Synonyms: Expect less strange synonyms in our searches.
Local: New way of handing mixed queries containing local and navigational intent.
Search: Freshness algorithm which used to handle only news is now active for all results.
Page Analysis: Additional improvements in perception of website quality.
Anchor Text: Better interpretation of anchor text data in relation to query or website theme.
Local & News: One local signal turned off. Similar one replacing it improving the relevance of local news.
News: One news signal related to quality turned off.
Synonyms: Improved sibling synonym handling to remove strange instances not relevant to search intent.
Synonyms: More accurate synonym handling and improved performance.
Search Query: Staying on track of user search intent through tuned retrieval system by eliminating elements of search query not needed for the retrieval of relevant documents.
Synonyms: Less ‘aggressive’ and suggestive providing better variety of suggestions.
Local: Improved handling of geographic data.
Name Detection: Improved detection of names, especially celebrities.
Personalised Search: Changed and updated quality signals.
Page Analysis: More accurate detection of old pages.
Language: Improved detection of languages in auto-complete.
Discussion Search: Smarter forum and blog post date detection.
Auto-complete: Rewriting of search query prefixes.
Mobile: More elaborate sitelinks.
Answers: Higher accuracy of short answers.
Video: Back-end clean-up for advanced video search.
+1: Support for more countries and domains.
Local: Better rendering on tablet devices.