Since its launch in 1996, Google Search has dominated the search engine market, gaining upwards of 90% of market penetration in certain regions. Google owes much of this success to its ability to continually build upon and evolve the product it first launched in the early days of the internet. Though Google's engineers are continually refining Search's capabilities, the following updates drove some of the biggest and most impactful changes.
Internationalization (2000)
Searching the internet requires the capability to crawl across countless websites, index the information found, and formulaically return targeted results to the user, based on their inputs. Imagine the added complexities that followed when Google Search expanded into 13 new languages in 2000.
Google Panda (2011)
Seeking to improve the quality and relevance of results returned to users, Google made drastic changes to its algorithms to lower the prioritization of websites with a high volume of advertisements or "content farms". This update is estimated to have impacted the prioritization of upwards of 12% of all search results, primarily increasing the ranking of results from news outlets and social media sites.
Google Hummingbird (2013)
When entering a search, users intend to find websites that relate to the collective meaning of the words they input. Prior to Hummingbird, search results related most closely to a few key words included in each search. This update allowed Search to place a higher emphasize on "natural language" by developing a greater level of understanding of the combination of words included in the search input.
Google Pigeon (2014)
When we use Google Search, we often care most about results that are relevant to our current location. If I search for "coffee shops" while on vacation in Munich, I really don't care about "The Top 10 Coffeeshops in New York". Pigeon was designed to help search place a higher prioritization on local results.
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