As the world’s number one search engine, it’s no surprise Google is constantly undergoing upgrades and improvements. It has been estimated that the number of tweaks the site performs per year is now around 500 and one of their biggest was last year’s Caffeine update.
Caffeine revolutionised the way the search index was updated. Rather than analyse the whole web before including updated content, the system made it possible to review the internet in smaller portions, allowing it to more quickly add fresh content. At the time, Google Research head Peter Norvig referred to it as a change from indexing “batches of billions” to “billions of batches”.
Building on these developments, Google has announced yet another push in this direction, with updates set to impact up to 35per cent of current search results. The goal of these updates is provide useful results for searches where there is a constant stream of new information. For example, searches for “Manchester City score” or “romantic comedies in cinemas” will be more likely to reveal pages showing the results of the latest football match or only rank pages about movies currently in theatres.
Using Google’s unique ‘intelligence’, the latest changes should also recognise that searches like “peter the great biography” or “doctor Detroit review” will rely more heavily on historical data – and that recently updated content may not be as relevant.
MEC opinion: Some people see these improvements as part of Google’s attempt to hold off threats from the competition - especially with the looming spectre of Apple’s voice-activated Siri coming with the iPhone 4S.
However, while Siri offers an interesting front-end application that allows the user to converse with your device (a female voice in the US but male for the UK version), the system itself still defaults to Google. With Google owning 97per cent of all searches on mobile devices (according to StatCounter), it doesn’t seem Google will be in danger any time soon.
