Google is continually improving Google Search to provide the most relevant and reliable results.
This is especially important in the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) sector, where reliability is critical. Besides, current events — the pandemic and upcoming U.S. election — further emphasize the importance of reliable search results.
Last week, the search giant announced how it had changed Google Search over the past year.
According to Google Fellow and Vice President of Google Search, Pandu Nayak, the announcement wasn’t a product of feature launch. Instead, it’s about ongoing changes that these products have undergone over the years.
The announcement reads:
“Delivering high-quality results is what has always set Google apart from other search engines… Over the years as the product and user experience have evolved, our investments in quality have accelerated.”
Here are some tweaks and changes that Google Search has undergone in the past year.
Some Updates to Google Search in the Past Year
Auto-Complete Policy Changes
With the election approaching, Google is taking a more conservative approach with auto-complete suggestions. Rather than show an accurate suggestion, the search engine might not display anything at all.
Pandu explained:
“We expanded Autocomplete policies related to elections, and we will remove predictions that could be interpreted as claims for or against any candidate or political party.”
Google BERT for Fact-Checking
Google is now leveraging BERT for fact-checking. The search giant uses the language AI model to assess the reliability of stories in Google News.
According to Pandu, the system can understand whether a fact check claim is related to the central topic. It’ll also be able to surface those fact checks more prominently in Full Coverage.
Breaking News
In the past, it took over 40 minutes for Google to detect breaking news queries. But that’s no longer the case.
Now, the search engine can detect breaking news queries within minutes of the breaking. That way, it can quickly select the authoritative sites that it wants to surface for those queries.
Knowledge Graph and Wikipedia
Google relies heavily on Wikipedia for its knowledge panels and featured snippets.
So, the search company has an incentive to ensure that entries to the online encyclopedia are reliable and accurate. For example, the tech giant has added some additional protection and detection systems to prevent inaccurate information from appearing in its knowledge panel.
The Wikiloop program is one such system.
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