Ranking Changes

• 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.