Search quality highlights: 52 changes for April

[Donna]

Search quality highlights: 52 changes for April
5/4/12
[insidesearch.blogspot.ca ]

Some of the more interesting highlights :

Increase base index size by 15%. [project codename "Indexing"] 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%. *Note: We’re constantly tuning the size of our different indexes and changes may not always appear in these blog posts.

New index tier. [launch codename "cantina", project codename "Indexing"] 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.

Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.

No freshness boost for low quality sites. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude sites identified as particularly low-quality.

More authoritative results. We’ve tweaked a signal we use to surface more authoritative content.

Fewer autocomplete predictions leading to low-quality results. [launch codename "Queens5", project codename "Autocomplete"] We’ve rolled out a change designed to show fewer autocomplete predictions leading to low-quality results.

More efficient generation of alternative titles. [launch codename "HalfMarathon"] 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. [launch codename "kebmo"] 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.

Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.

Anchors bug fix. [launch codename "Organochloride", project codename "Anchors"] This change fixed a bug related to our handling of anchors.

More domain diversity. [launch codename "Horde", project codename "Domain Crowding"] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.

And more .....

Probably its not only Panda and Penguin what's causing all the commotion last month.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:19 am (utc) on May 8, 2012]
[edit reason] added quote box and fixed title [/edit]

[backdraft7]

It's clear that Google needs (at least) two more tabs at the top of the page, one for "Wiki" and one for "Amazon" and possibly an "Idiots" tab for answers dot com and the like...
If we had to live with some people's apparent preferred version of the web, all we would need for "reasonable results" would be wikipedia for info and Amazon for shopping. Now wouldn't that be a shame for all those small business folks out there.

[rlange]

atlrus wrote:
Google with all the talk about being more intuitive and what not returns beer which is NOT flat tire beer but FAT TIRE beer. Even you have to admit that this is just unbelievable.

Actually, I believe "flat tire" is a common mishearing or misremembering of the beer's name, so it's not at all unbelievable that Google would offer up beer results for that query. My one brother-in-law loves that beer and I know that when it pops into my head, it's with the "L".

--
Ryan

[jonathanleger]

Would someone like to try and defend Google's showing a Colorado photography site showing in the top ten for a major two word phrase regarding insurance providers? Seems like no matter how much the serps smack against common sense, there's always somebody willing to spin some yarn in Google's defense instead of just admitting that Big G seriously messed up with the Penguin update.

[anteck]

Jonathan, the fact that the most commonly quoted screwup keyword (male enhancement) for this update STILL returns all kinds of stupid results, speaks truth.

A search in australia today returns a web design firm, a yoga studio and 3 malware sites in the top 10. Completely unrelated.

Google sucks balls, it's gotten worse and worse with every one of these panda updates, and it doesn't look like it's improving any time soon.

Everything went downhill quick once Page got back in control.

[fred9989]

Broadly speaking, I think Joanathan is right. Leaving aside partisanship (we are all webmasters, after all) as far as possible, there are some totally rubbish results. For example, try the infamous one word search for a blue pill for men's (ahem) personal problems and see how the results look: modified only by the obvious addition of the manufacturer's site, which was missing after Penguin/Panda, those results could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as good quality.
My point being, that this is not a fat tire / flat tire situation - it's an unambiguous search. The only defence I see for the results would be that they have information (Wikipedia) a licensed sales site, and the manufacturere's site. You might argue this was good enough....but are we to accept that Google can only get 3 results out of 10 correct? I haven't even looked at the second page. (And why do those sites which are compromised / hacked still show up in the search results?)

[Robert Charlton]

...the infamous one word search for a blue pill

The eternal quest. ;) On the result that jumps out at you (so to speak), the obviously inappropriate title on the .edu domain should indicate that the site has been hacked.

There's a cloaked redirect in there, the kind of thing that's impossible to see on the page, and which visitors to the site who aren't coming in through that specific one-word search won't see either. If you enter the url of the site into a browser address bar, it's not going to redirect.

As Matt Cutts notes in this blog post, Google can't install everybody's security patches for them....

Example email to a hacked site
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/example-email-to-a-hacked-site/ [mattcutts.com]

Beyond clear-cut blackhat webspam, the second-biggest category of spam that Google deals with is hacked sites.

Bing probably doesn't have nearly the same degree of elaborate hacks to deal with, because... since Google has the market share... hackers target Google.