A History of Google Algorithm Updates and What’s Next
Google’s search algorithms have improved dramatically over the past few years, making it difficult for its competitors to keep up with the site and stay at the top of search engines. This article recaps some of the most important updates Google has made to their algorithm over the last six years.
The article mentions 5 major updates Google has had:
- The Google Toolbar was released on December 1, 2000. The Google Toolbar was a “browser plugin for Internet Explorer 5 and 6, which allowed users to see the PageRank of any page they entered”.
- The updates in 2003-2004 were called Cansandra, Austin and Florida. Google decided to penalized websites that included pages of invisible text (which would allow them to include more keywords and increase their PageRank). These updates accounted for techniques like these and made sure that they didn’t skew the accuracy of search results.
- From 2011-2012, updates Nofollow, Jagger, Panda, and Penguin all focused on improving de-ranking algorithms. In these updates, pages with low-quality links became unlinked to their untrusted sources.
- From 2013-2015, Google focused more on improving search results by “understand users queries, instead of relying on keywords, and produced more relevant results”. This was a major update since before Humming Bird, the algorithm that Google used only relied on keywords, which is something websites could heavily manipulate to their advantage in terms of PageRank. In addition, the update Pigeon emphasized the importance of local search results, putting high-quality links at the top of the search engines. This update dramatically altered return queries.
- Finally, from 2015-2017, Google chose to examine machine learning applications and use it to their advantage with their search algorithm. The new update called RankBrain was based off of Humming Bird, but incorporated machine learning techniques so that Google has a better understanding of search queries and continues to improves its results.
But, what’s next for the Google algorithm?
Recently, Google announced that the next update will focus on giving higher PageRanks for sites that are faster for mobile searches. I’m interested to see what’s in store for algorithm improvements in the future.
This article relates to the concepts discussed in class as it directly relates to PageRank. In class, we learned that in modern day, the Web has shifted towards a problem of abundance, rather than scarcity in terms of information retrieval. Google’s search engine directly relates to using PageRank to find the most relevant searches, just like how using the hub-authority algorithm is used. The algorithm that Google implements will ultimately help the searcher find the most useful information to him or her. Furthermore, the idea of the bowtie structure of the Web also relates to this article. With the Nofollow, Jagger, Penguin, and Panda updates, weak low quality in-links were removed (the right-hand-side of the bowtie structure). I thought it was cool how I could now have a visual representation of the web when reading these algorithm improvements.
Overall, I found this article to be extremely interesting and informative. It did a great job in explaining how Google updated its search algorithm, and was very relevant to the topics recently covered in class.