Google Changes Search Algorithm to Factor Timeliness Into Results
Google’s success is based on how well they can provide users the best and most relevant results to a given topic. Google has changed their search algorithm to make timeliness of a result more significant with respect to its relevancy score. Timeliness has become more important in recent years with the development of social networks that turns significant parts of the web into a real time newsfeed. Users are turning to networks like Twitter since it can provide near real-time information on a given topic whereas traditional web searches do not necessarily provide this timeliness. This algorithm change hopes to mitigate that somewhat. The algorithm will analyze your search query and determine how timely your results need to be. For example, if you were looking up a recipe, timeliness would not matter much, however if you were querying for election returns, you probably would not care much about last years data. This algorithm should allow Google to better serve the search needs of its users and still remain dominant in the search market.
Google’s search algorithm has been tremendously effective at successfully finding relevant information on the Web. The traditional notion of the Web being a large collection of pages that are linked together has somewhat changed. A page that is relevant today may very well might not be relevant tomorrow. This effect is not handled very well by information retrieval algorithms like PageRank. PageRank defines the relevancy of a node as being directly related to the number of links coming into it. An old piece of information on the web may very well have many incoming links — especially if at one time it was very relevant to a topic. If the information becomes stale though it wont be useful to the user. Google’s change to their search algorithm should help them bridge the gap between their current algorithm and the emphasis today’s Web users place on current information.