[governance] Fwd: Google Public Policy Blog

McTim dogwallah at gmail.com
Tue Nov 15 09:13:32 EST 2011


Will be of interest to those who discussed this last year:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Google Public Policy Blog <ogogster at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:27:08 +0000
Subject: Google Public Policy Blog
To: dogwallah at gmail.com

Google Public Policy Blog

///////////////////////////////////////////
Ten recent algorithm changes

Posted: 14 Nov 2011 10:03 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GooglePublicPolicyBlog/~3/ixr7mZ79S3s/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Posted by Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer



Starting today, we'll begin cross-posting some entries from our Inside
Search blog to help pull back the curtain even further on how Google search
works. We hope to provide greater transparency by posting regular updates
about our major search ranking changes.



Today we’re continuing our long-standing series of blog posts to share the
methodology and process behind our search ranking, evaluation and
algorithmic changes. This summer we published a video that gives a glimpse
into our overall process, and today we want to give you a flavor of
specific algorithm changes by publishing a highlight list of many of the
improvements we’ve made over the past couple weeks.



We’ve published hundreds of blog posts about search over the years on this
blog, our Official Google Blog, and even on my personal blog. But we’re
always looking for ways to give you even deeper insight into the over 500
changes we make to search in a given year. In that spirit, here’s a list of
ten improvements from the past couple weeks:

Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages
where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili,
Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian,
Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web
pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles
in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but
only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take
you to pages translated from English into the query language.
Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change
helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our
understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text
from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a
header or menu.
Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors:
We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal
is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate
links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting
less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are
specific to the page’s content.
Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces
the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We
will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the
partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is
already our practice in English.
Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets
for applications. This enables people who are searching for software
applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their
search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich
snippets, so they will be available more often.
Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit
signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a
significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image
Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the
web.
Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve
made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change
impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search
results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level
of freshness for a given query.
Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most
relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we
attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank
official websites even higher in our ranking.
Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result
freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This
helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date
range that they specify.
Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete
handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters).
Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to
type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions
for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.
If you’re a site owner, before you go wild tuning your anchor text or
thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users, please remember that
this is only a sampling of the hundreds of changes we make to our search
algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely
as you’d imagine. We’ve decided to publish these descriptions in part
because these specific changes are less susceptible to gaming.



For those of us working in search every day, we think this stuff is
incredibly exciting -- but then again, we’re big search geeks. Let us know
what you think and we’ll consider publishing more posts like this in the
future.



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-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
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