Inside Search: Search quality highlights: new monthly series on algorithm changes

Inside Search

The official Google Search blog

Search quality highlights: new monthly series on algorithm changes

December 1, 2011

Update 16 May, 2012, 7:00pm: We made a minor update to the description of the "parked domain" classifier to ensure we aren't implying ads can't be useful.post like thisPandafreshness update

Related query results refinements: Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are similar to the actual search you type. This change makes it less likely that these results will rank highly if the original query had a rare word that was dropped in the alternate query. For example, if you are searching for [rare red widgets], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions “red widgets.”

More comprehensive indexing: This change makes more long-tail documents available in our index, so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries.

New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites with little unique content for our users and are often filled only with ads. In most cases, we prefer not to show them.

More autocomplete predictions: With autocomplete, we try to strike a balance between coming up with flexible predictions and remaining true to your intentions. This change makes our prediction algorithm a little more flexible for certain queries, without losing your original intention.

Fresher and more complete blog search results: We made a change to our blog search index to get coverage that is both fresher and more comprehensive.

Original content: We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.

Live results for Major League Soccer and the Canadian Football League: This change displays the latest scores & schedules from these leagues along with quick access to game recaps and box scores.

Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often.

Layout on tablets: We made some minor color and layout changes to improve usability on tablet devices.

Top result selection code rewrite: This code handles extra processing on the top set of results. For example, it ensures that we don’t show too many results from one site (“host crowding”). We rewrote the code to make it easier to understand, simpler to maintain and more flexible for future extensions.