Keen to enhance the quality of its page ranking algorithm in an endeavor to provide more quality and informative websites to users cutting across domains and geographies. The search engine giant has been bringing about a series of changes to shore up its page ranking attributes, indexing methods, and a host of other features. We’ve already checked some of the search quality updates initiated by Google in the recent times, including country identification for pages; more domain diversity; local navigational search improvements; more local websites from organizations, and smoother ranking changes for fresh search results, among others. We review other changes that form part of the most recent enhancements:
Freshness signals and Instant Previews
If improvement in a freshness signal has brought about a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals that helps to identify fresh documents more effectively, it has modified a classifier used for promoting fresh content so as to exclude fresh content identified as low-quality. A smart tweak to trigger behavior for the Instant Previews will narrow the trigger area so that users won’t get to see a preview till they hover over the icon just to the right of each result. The feature would trigger in the past only if one happened to ‘mouse into’ a rather larger button area. The engine has internationalized the sunrise & sunset search feature to more than 30 new languages. So now users can plan an evening jog just before dusk more easily or set alarm to view the sunrise.
Better query interpretation
More importantly, better query interpretation will helps Google better interpret the likely intention of a user’s search query as denoted by the last few searches. On the other hand, news universal results serving improvements will streamline the news results’ serving by shifting to greater unified system architecture, whereas the user interface for dynamic news results while users searching for a certain breaking news topic has also been improved. People now will see a large image thumbnail just alongside two fresh news results.
Broadened range of user features in more languages
More thorough predictions are there in the offing for local queries to make the autocomplete predictions more comprehensive by expanding existing coverage for certain long-tail U.S. local search queries like addresses or small businesses. Another set of changes to triggering will improve the public data search feature triggering in order to broaden the range of user queries, which will return helpful population as well as unemployment data. There are also improvements done to SafeSearch for both videos and images as well as improved SafeSearch models apart from more spell corrections for long queries.
Other enhancements and additions
In some cases if users misspelled a search query, say (pneumatic), the results they found would actually be those for pneumatic, or the corrected query. Google after having the explicit ‘Showing results for’ interface more often in English, is now expanding the same to several new international languages. Another algorithm feature that first checks any spell prediction to know if it is useful before actually presenting it to the engine user has been expanded to different languages.
Apart from introducing an additional indexing tier to back up continued comprehensiveness in results, there is also a visible backend improvements in serving as well as better ranking of expanded sitelinks and ‘Sub-sitelinks’” in expanded sitelinks. Better HTML5 resource caching for mobile, more efficient generation of alternative titles. More concise and/or informative titles, less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks, and Sitelinks data refresh features have also been added or enhanced.
