With Amit Singhal being announced the keynote speaker of Google, here are some of the areas he enlightened people on.

The very first thing that was made clear by Mr. Singhal, when asked was no revenue measurement is included in the evaluation of rankings change. The changes are made with a sole purpose to deliver more accurate search results to queries. Hence, he also talked about the improvisations, and time-to-time changes this search engine makes to deliver better results.

Keyword Based Results –

Google, earlier used to deliver keyword based results i.e., the ‘meaning’ of the word was not understood – the results were matched with the typed word only. But with ‘Universal Search’, the results became better in 2007 as they tried to understand the intent behind every search word entered by the searcher.

2012 is the Year of Personalization –

As we all know that in 2012, Google took a turn towards ‘Personalization’ by incorporating Google Plus into the search results, Mr. Amit Singhal talks about the evaluation of changes. Here’s a summary of evaluation put forth by the keynote speaker:

How Google Engineers test the algorithm changes before making it live?

The engineers have an idea of tweaking and introducing of which signal would help in better relevancy of results. Once the changes are made to the algorithm accordingly, the ‘after’ and ‘before’ results are tested by the human raters. Their report depends on the relevant results generated for the wide set of queries. The algorithms are changed till the relevancy gets better.

These, are then loaded into a data centre and put forth to a small number of searchers. Then the searchers who use the tweaked algorithm results and the ones whose algorithms are still the same are compared. Based on this data, a statistical analysis is presented in a search engine meeting. The data is then looked after by the engineers and the tweaked algorithms are accepted after a debate on the same.

When asked about the Panda and Penguin updates, he said that Google’s algorithms are not perfect. Amit Singhal, looks into the bad queries himself, everyday. According to him, the algorithm changes i.e., the Panda and Penguin updates have proven to give much better search results.

Important algorithm changes by Google in 2012

From penalizing over-optimized sites to knowledge graph, Google has been striving hard towards delivering accurate results and focus on the organic content to pushing irrelevant content and paid websites aside. Some of the major changes Google made in 2012 are:

1. Search Plus your World
   Was it a strategy to promote Google Plus or just a way to collect more data? No one knows! But whatever it was, it was a major change made by this giant search engine. If you want traffic to your website without having to go the SEO way, this was one of the easiest ways to mark your presence in the virtual world.

 

2. ‘Page Layout’ Algorithm

With ‘Page Layout’ Algorithm, Google made the websites clutter-free and easier for the visitors to find the content they were searching for on the website. Just the way over-optimized sites were penalized; here the pages that were loaded with advertisements especially the top of the page were penalized.

3. Knowledge Graph

Knowledge Graph being the most recent change, most people know this update while others are still wondering, ‘why this change?’ With this change, the searchers will not have to crawl through multiple websites to find a piece of information. They will get it on the Google’s search page only.

4. Penguin Updates

ast, but not the least – Penguin Updates. The algorithm change that affected 3.1% of the search results. The update targetted webspam, over-optimized websites and all other black-hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing, duplicate or automated content and linking schemes. What difference did this make?

According to Google, the low-quality content websites were targetted to deliver only and only relevant results to the searchers.

So, as long as Google works hard to provide only and only the RELEVANT
results, we can blindly depend on this search engine for every tiny mini query.