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Google gives its SERPs a minor nudge this week as it upgrades the ranking algorithm that’s responsible for showing a user the most relevant and latest results for a query. The recent upgrade aims to give users the latest results about recent trending news, ongoing events, and frequent updates for gadgets or apps.
The upgrade is actually part of Google’s Caffeine indexing system which enhances the search engine with more relevant and timely results for queries. While most Internet users tend to get news from social networks like Facebook and Twitter, people now have higher expectations when it comes to using search engines for relevant content. Thus, urging Google to launch content enhancing tools such as the “Standout” tag which webmasters can use to promote a news article in accordance to what is currently trending. The idea here is for Google to help news publishers to increase the exposure of their news articles while giving users relevant and instant news.
Google says that Caffeine was simply an infrastructure change so that spiders can index and return faster results for queries. But now, the minor tweak actually improves the “freshness” of results. Freshness will mean that Google will give you only the latest content about a recurring event or a trending news. For trending news, when you search for NBA news, I bet Google will most likely give returns about the current lockout instead of giving you the latest team standings. And if you searched for “Olympics” the search results should yield latest developments about the Olympics in London instead of Olympics in China that was held before.
The recent upgrade reminds of what Google is really cooking. A couple of weeks ago, Google announced that they’re about to launch Google Analytics Real-Time soon. Google has always been upgrading their algorithm every few months or so. The most recent major change was Google Panda that eliminated content farms and malicious duplicate sites. As Google improves Google Analytics, expect a repercussion to create more changes in the search algorithm.
