40 Updates to Google Search in February 2012
February 27th, 2012
It looks like Google has been pretty busy with updates this this month. In addition to their announcement of a Panda 3.3 update, they have implemented 40 additional changes to their search algorithm.
Some of the more interesting ones would be:
- Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
- Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
- Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
- “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
- More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
