Inside Search: Search quality highlights: 65 changes for August and September

Inside Search

The official Google Search blog

Search quality highlights: 65 changes for August and September

October 4, 2012

last postbuilding the search engine of the future.

#82862. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.

#83197. [project “Autocomplete”] This launch introduced changes in the way we generate query predictions for Autocomplete.

#83818. [project “Answers”] This change improved display of the movie showtimes feature.

#83819. [project “Answers”] We improved display of the MLB search feature.

#83820. [project “Answers”] This change improved display of the finance search feature.

#83384. [project “Universal Search”] We made improvements to driving directions in Turkish.

#83459. [project “Alternative Search Methods”] We added support for answers about new stock exchanges for voice queries.

LTS. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We improved our web ranking to determine what pages are relevant for queries containing locations.

Maru. [project “SafeSearch”] We updated SafeSearch to improve the handling of adult video content in videos mode for queries that are not looking for adult content.

#83135. [project “Query Understanding”] This change updated term-proximity scoring.

#83659. [project “Answers”] We made improvements to display of the local time search feature.

#83105. [project “Snippets”] We refreshed data used to generate sitelinks.

Imadex. [project “Freshness”] This change updated handling of stale content and applies a more granular function based on document age.

#83613. [project “Universal Search”] This change added the ability to show a more appropriately sized video thumbnail on mobile when the user clearly expresses intent for a video.

#83443. [project “Knowledge Graph”] We added a lists and collections component to the Knowledge Graph.

#83442. [project “Snippets”] This change improved a signal we use to determine how relevant a possible result title actually is for the page.

#83012. [project “Knowledge Graph] The Knowledge Graph displays factual information and refinements related to many types of searches. This launch extended the Knowledge Graph to English-speaking locales beyond the U.S.

#84063. [project “Answers”] We added better understanding of natural language searches for the calculator feature, focused on currencies and arithmetic.

nearby. [project “User Context”] We improved the precision and coverage of our system to help you find more relevant local web results. Now we’re better able to identify web results that are local to the user, and rank them appropriately.

essence. [project “Autocomplete”] This change introduced entity predictions in autocomplete. Now Google will predict not just the string of text you might be looking for, but the actual real-world thing. Clarifying text will appear in the drop-down box to help you disambiguate your search.

#83821. [project “Answers”] We introduced better natural language parsing for display of the conversions search feature.

#82279. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We changed to fewer results for some queries to show the most relevant results as quickly as possible.

#82407. [project “Other Search Features”] For pages that we do not crawl because of robots.txt, we are usually unable to generate a snippet for users to preview what's on the page. This change added a replacement snippet that explains that there's no description available because of robots.txt.

#83709. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change was a minor bug fix related to the way links are used in ranking.

#82546. [project “Indexing”] We made back-end improvements to video indexing to improve the efficiency of our systems.

Palace. [project “SafeSearch”] This change decreased the amount of adult content that will show up in Image Search mode when SafeSearch is set to strict.

#84010. [project “Page Quality”] We refreshed data for the "Panda" high-quality sites algorithm.

#84083. [project “Answers”] This change improved the display of the movie showtimes search feature.

gresshoppe. [project “Answers”] We updated the display of the flight search feature for searches without a specified destination.

#83670. [project “Snippets”] We made improvements to surface fewer generic phrases like "comments on" and "logo" in search result titles.

#83777. [project “Synonyms”] This change made improvements to rely on fewer "low-confidence" synonyms when the user's original query has good results.

#83377. [project “User Context”] We made improvements to show more relevant local results.

#83484. [project “Refinements”] This change helped users refine their searches to find information about the right person, particularly when there are many prominent people with the same name.

#82872. [project “SafeSearch”] In "strict" SafeSearch mode we remove results if they are not very relevant. This change previously launched in English, and this change expanded it internationally.

Knowledge Graph Carousel. [project “Knowledge Graph”] This change expanded the Knowledge Graph carousel feature globally in English.

Sea. [project “SafeSearch”] This change helped prevent adult content from appearing when SafeSearch is in "strict" mode.

#84259. [project “Autocomplete”] This change tweaked the display of real-world entities in autocomplete to reduce repetitiveness. With this change, we don't show the entity name (displayed to the right of the dash) when it's fully contained in the query.

TSSPC. [project “Spelling”] This change used spelling algorithms to improve the relevance of long-tail autocomplete predictions.

#83689. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.

#84068. [project “Answers”] We improved the display of the currency conversion search feature.

#84586. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change improved how we rank documents for queries with location terms.

Dot. [project “Autocomplete”] We improved cursor-aware predictions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. Suppose you're searching for "restaurants" and then decide you want "Italian restaurants." With cursor-aware predictions, once you put your cursor back to the beginning of the search box and start typing "I," the prediction system will make predictions for "Italian," not completions of "Irestaurants."

#84288. [project “Autocomplete”] This change made improvements to show more fresh predictions in autocomplete for Korean.

trafficmaps. [project “Universal Search”] With this change, we began showing a traffic map for queries like "traffic from A to B" or "traffic between A and B."

#84394. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.

#84652. [project “Snippets”] We currently generate titles for PDFs (and other non-html docs) when converting the documents to HTML. These auto-generated titles are usually good, but this change made them better by looking at other signals.

#83761. [project “Freshness”] This change helped you find the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant for a given search query.

#83406. [project “Query Understanding”] We improved our ability to show relevant Universal Search results by better understanding when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.

espd. [project “Autocomplete”] This change provided entities in autocomplete that are more likely to be relevant to the user's country. See blog post for background.

#83391. [project “Answers”] This change internationalized and improved the precision of the symptoms search feature.

#82876. [project “Autocomplete”] We updated autocomplete predictions when predicted queries share the same last word.

#83304. [project “Knowledge Graph”] This change updated signals that determine when to show summaries of topics in the right-hand panel.

#84211. [project “Snippets”] This launch led to better snippet titles.

#81360. [project “Translation and Internationalization”] With this launch, we began showing local URLs to users instead of general homepages where applicable (e.g. blogspot.ch instead of blogspot.com for users in Switzerland). That’s relevant, for example, for global companies where the product pages are the same, but the links for finding the nearest store are country-dependent.

#81999. [project “Translation and Internationalization”] We revamped code for understanding which documents are relevant for particular regions and languages automatically (if not annotated by the webmaster).

Cobra. [project “SafeSearch”] We updated SafeSearch algorithms to better detect adult content.

#937372. [project “Other Search Features”] The translate search tool is available through the link "Translated foreign pages" in the sidebar of the search result page. In addition, when we guess that a non-English search query would have better results from English documents, we'll show a feature at the bottom of the search results page to suggest users try the translate search tool. This change improved the relevance of when we show the suggestion.

#84460. [project “Snippets”] This change helped to better identify important phrases on a given webpage.

#80435. [project “Autocomplete”] This change improves autocomplete predictions based on the user's Web History (for signed-in users).

#83901. [project “Synonyms”] This change improved the use of synonyms for search terms to more often return results that are relevant to the user's intention.