- Improvements to SafeSearch for videos and images. We've made improvements to our SafeSearch signals in videos and images mode, making it less likely you'll see adult content when you aren't looking for it.
- Improved SafeSearch models. This change improves our classifier used to categorize pages for SafeSearch in 40+ languages.
- More domain diversity. Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.
- Categorize paginated documents. Sometimes, search results can be dominated by documents from a paginated series. This change helps surface more diverse results in such cases.
- Country identification for webpages. Location is an important signal we use to surface content more relevant to a particular country. For a while we've had systems designed to detect when a website, subdomain, or directory is relevant to a set of countries. This change extends the granularity of those systems to the page level for sites that host user generated content, meaning that some pages on a particular site can be considered relevant to France, while others might be considered relevant to Spain.
- Disable salience in snippets. This change updates our system for generating snippets to keep it consistent with other infrastructure improvements. It also simplifies and increases consistency in the snippet generation process.
- More text from the beginning of the page in snippets. This change makes it more likely we'll show text from the beginning of a page in snippets when that text is particularly relevant.
- Tweak to trigger behavior for Instant Previews. This change narrows the trigger area for Instant Previews so that you won't see a preview until you hover and pause over the icon to the right of each search result. In the past the feature would trigger if you moused into a larger button area.
- Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.
- News universal results serving improvements. This change streamlines the serving of news results on Google by shifting to more unified system architecture.
- More efficient generation of alternative titles. We use a variety of signals to generate titles in search results. This change makes the process more efficient, saving tremendous CPU resources without degrading quality.
- More concise and/or informative titles. We look at a number of factors when deciding what to show for the title of a search result. This change means you'll find more informative titles and/or more concise titles with the same information.
- "Sub-sitelinks" in expanded sitelinks. This improvement digs deeper into megasitelinks by showing sub-sitelinks instead of the normal snippet.
- Better ranking of expanded sitelinks. This change improves the ranking of megasitelinks by providing a minimum score for the sitelink based on a score for the same URL used in general ranking.
- Sitelinks data refresh. Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search results and link deeper into the site) are generated in part by an offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine the most relevant links to show users. We've recently updated the data through our offline process.
- Less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks. We've adopted a new technique to reduce duplication in the snippets of expanded sitelinks.
Index Updates:
- Increase base index size by 15%. The base search index is our main index for serving search results and every query that comes into Google is matched against this index. This change increases the number of documents served by that index by 15%.
- New index tier. We keep our index in "tiers" where different documents are indexed at different rates depending on how relevant they are likely to be to users. This month we introduced an additional indexing tier to support continued comprehensiveness in search results.
- Improvement in a freshness signal. This change is a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals which helps to better identify fresh documents.
- No freshness boost for low-quality content. We have modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.
- Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. We want to help you find the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web content, such as breaking news topics. We try to promote content that appears to be fresh. This change applies a more granular classifier, leading to more nuanced changes in ranking based on freshness.
- Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you're searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.
- Backend improvements in serving. We've rolled out some improvements to our serving systems making them less computationally expensive and massively simplifying code.
- Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.
- More authoritative results. We've tweaked a signal we use to surface more authoritative content.
