For our 25th birthday, we’re looking back at some of the milestones that made Google more helpful, from Autocomplete to Multisearch and beyond.
Have you ever watched a great cooking show? The fun is not just in seeing the finished dish, but also in understanding the inspiration, ingredients, execution and presentation — all the factors that went into making the meal.
That’s how we feel about Search: There’s value not just in seeing your search results, but also in understanding the factors that went into our systems to determine that those results would be useful for you. That’s why we share information about how Google Search works, and build tools like About this result. Today, we’re expanding About this result to help you understand and control how Search connects you to helpful results that are tailored for you.
About this result already tells you about some of the most important factors that Google Search uses to connect results to your queries. These are factors like looking at whether a webpage has keywords that match your search, or if it contains related terms, or if it’s in the language that you’re searching in.
Often the words in your query give our systems all the context they need to return relevant results. But there are some situations where showing the most relevant, helpful information means tailoring results to your tastes or preferences. In these cases, personalized results can make it easier to find content you might like.
For example, at Search On today, we announced how you’ll soon be able to enjoy a more personalized shopping experience when you shop with Google — helping you quickly see results from the brands and departments you like.
Another example of how personalized results can be helpful is if you search for something like “what to watch.” You might prefer a suspenseful thriller, whereas someone else might want a rom-com. That’s why Search offers movie and TV recommendations (if you have personal results turned on). Once you select the streaming services that you use, you’ll get personalized recommendations for what’s available and quickly see where to watch your picks.
Starting today, in English for mobile users globally, you’ll also be able to find more inspiration for your next meal. You can search for “dinner ideas” to see personalized recommendations for recipes you might like to try. If you have a specific hankering, you can search by cuisine or dietary preferences — for example, “Thai recipes.”
We’re also launching a new update to About this result so you can easily see if a result is personalized. You can quickly access controls to manage personal results, including the ability to turn them off completely, if you want. And as always, we offer easy-to-use tools to control how and whether your search history and activity are saved to your account. This update to About this result will be available in English in the U.S. to start.
This information in About this result will also help anyone understand that not all Google Search results are personalized. Our systems only personalize when doing so can provide more relevant and helpful information. Results can differ between two people for reasons other than personalization, such as location. For example, if you searched for coffee shops near you in Columbus, OH, we wouldn’t show you the same results as someone searching for coffee shops in Tucson, AZ.
The information in About this result can give you a better understanding of how Google connects you to relevant, helpful results. As always, our goal is to help you discover the information that’s most useful to you, so you can find inspiration no matter what you’re searching for.
Have you ever watched a great cooking show? The fun is not just in seeing the finished dish, but also in understanding the inspiration, ingredients, execution and presentation — all the factors that went into making the meal.
That’s how we feel about Search: There’s value not just in seeing your search results, but also in understanding the factors that went into our systems to determine that those results would be useful for you. That’s why we share information about how Google Search works, and build tools like About this result. Today, we’re expanding About this result to help you understand and control how Search connects you to helpful results that are tailored for you.
About this result already tells you about some of the most important factors that Google Search uses to connect results to your queries. These are factors like looking at whether a webpage has keywords that match your search, or if it contains related terms, or if it’s in the language that you’re searching in.
Often the words in your query give our systems all the context they need to return relevant results. But there are some situations where showing the most relevant, helpful information means tailoring results to your tastes or preferences. In these cases, personalized results can make it easier to find content you might like.
For example, at Search On today, we announced how you’ll soon be able to enjoy a more personalized shopping experience when you shop with Google — helping you quickly see results from the brands and departments you like.
Another example of how personalized results can be helpful is if you search for something like “what to watch.” You might prefer a suspenseful thriller, whereas someone else might want a rom-com. That’s why Search offers movie and TV recommendations (if you have personal results turned on). Once you select the streaming services that you use, you’ll get personalized recommendations for what’s available and quickly see where to watch your picks.
Starting today, in English for mobile users globally, you’ll also be able to find more inspiration for your next meal. You can search for “dinner ideas” to see personalized recommendations for recipes you might like to try. If you have a specific hankering, you can search by cuisine or dietary preferences — for example, “Thai recipes.”
We’re also launching a new update to About this result so you can easily see if a result is personalized. You can quickly access controls to manage personal results, including the ability to turn them off completely, if you want. And as always, we offer easy-to-use tools to control how and whether your search history and activity are saved to your account. This update to About this result will be available in English in the U.S. to start.
This information in About this result will also help anyone understand that not all Google Search results are personalized. Our systems only personalize when doing so can provide more relevant and helpful information. Results can differ between two people for reasons other than personalization, such as location. For example, if you searched for coffee shops near you in Columbus, OH, we wouldn’t show you the same results as someone searching for coffee shops in Tucson, AZ.
The information in About this result can give you a better understanding of how Google connects you to relevant, helpful results. As always, our goal is to help you discover the information that’s most useful to you, so you can find inspiration no matter what you’re searching for.
Many of us have experienced the frustration of visiting a web page that seems like it has what we’re looking for, but doesn’t live up to our expectations. The content might not have the insights you want, or it may not even seem like it was created for, or even by, a person.
We work hard to make sure the pages we show on Search are as helpful and relevant as possible. To do this, we constantly refine our systems: Last year, we launched thousands of updates to Search based on hundreds of thousands of quality tests, including evaluations where we gather feedback from human reviewers.
We know people don’t find content helpful if it seems like it was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers. So starting next week for English users globally, we’re rolling out a series of improvements to Search to make it easier for people to find helpful content made by, and for, people. This ranking work joins a similar effort related to ranking better quality product review content over the past year, which will also receive an update. Together, these launches are part of a broader, ongoing effort to reduce low-quality content and make it easier to find content that feels authentic and useful in Search.
We continually update Search to make sure we're helping you find high quality content. Next week, we'll launch the “helpful content update” to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people. This ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search, and our testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related content.
For example, if you search for information about a new movie, you might have previously seen articles that aggregated reviews from other sites without adding perspectives beyond what’s available elsewhere. This isn’t very helpful if you’re expecting to read something new. With this update, you’ll see more results with unique, authentic information, so you’re more likely to read something you haven't seen before.
As always, we'll continue to refine our systems and build on this improvement over time. If you’re a content creator, you can learn more about today’s update and guidance to consider on Search Central.
We know product reviews can play an important role in helping you make a decision on something to buy. Last year, we kicked off a series of updates to show more helpful, in-depth reviews based on first-hand expertise in search results.
We've continued to refine these systems, and in the coming weeks, we’ll roll out another update to make it even easier to find high-quality, original reviews. We’ll continue this work to make sure you find the most useful information when you’re researching a purchase on the web.
We hope these updates will help you access more helpful information and valuable perspectives on Search. We look forward to building on this work to make it even easier to find original content by and for real people in the months ahead.
Local news is essential to building healthy communities. One of the most obvious examples of this was the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, when different communities had different needs and were impacted in different ways. Local news ensured that people knew what to do.
More broadly, readers are looking for local news more than ever before. Queries on Google Search like “News near me” have increased three-fold over the past five years, reaching an all time high during the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020.
At Google, we’re dedicated to finding new ways to help readers better connect with publishers and helping publishers more efficiently and creatively produce quality journalism their readers want. A year ago, we launched Journalist Studio, a set of free tools reporters can use in their daily jobs. Today we’re announcing a number of new features to help local publishers connect to readers, and new tools for reporters to produce deeper, more digitally focused work.
We have a number of new news features coming to Google Search to help readers find content from local publishers even more easily than before. First, we’re expanding a feature that we initially launched for COVID searches. Readers will soon see a carousel of local news stories when Google finds local news coverage relevant to their query. This carousel will be available globally in all languages and helps readers easily find stories near them from local news publishers. The feature helps local publishers by adding another way for their essential reporting to reach the community that needs it most.
Over the past few months, we've also been working on improving our systems so authoritative local news sources appear more often alongside national publications, when relevant, in our general news features such as Top Stories. This improvement ensures people will see authoritative local stories when they’re searching for news, helping both the brand and the content of news publishers reach more people.
In addition, we have improved the local news experience by refining our ability to understand topics beyond just broad areas, like sports, to narrower subtopics, such as football and high school football. When paired with our location signals, this helps readers get more relevant material for the topics they are searching. For example, if you’re in Detroit and search for football, we’ll now show you results for local high school and college teams, rather than just showing you results for, say, the professional team.
An example of how local news results will update to show additional subtopics
Social media can give readers additional information that they may be looking for about local issues. We recently launched a new way to help people find local information on the topics they’re searching for by surfacing tweets by local, authoritative sources and authors, including tweets from news organizations.
An example of how tweets by local, authoritative sources and authors can appear.
In addition to our product news, we’ve also been looking at how we can help reporters cover stories with locally relevant data.
The U.S. Census is one of the largest data sets journalists can access. It has layers and layers of important data that can help reporters tell detailed stories about their own communities. But the challenge is sorting through that data and visualizing it in a way that helps readers understand trends and the bigger picture.
Today we’re launching a new tool to help reporters dig through all that data to find stories and embed visualizations on their sites. The Census Mapper project is an embeddable map that displays Census data at the national, state and county level, as well as census tracts. It was produced in partnership with Pitch Interactive and Big Local News, as part of the 2020 Census Co-op (supported by the Google News Initiative and in cooperation with theJSK Journalism Fellowships).
Census Mapper shows where populations have grown over time.
The Census data is pulled from the data collected and processed by The Associated Press, one of the Census Co-op partners. Census Mapper then lets local journalists easily embed maps showing population change at any level, helping them tell powerful stories in a more visual way about their communities.
With the tool, you can zoom into states and below, such as North Carolina, shown here.
As part of our investment in data journalism we’re also making improvements to our Common Knowledge Project, a data explorer and visual journalism project to allow US journalists to explore local data. Built with journalists for journalists, the new version of Common Knowledge integrates journalist feedback and new features including geographic comparisons, new charts and visuals.
An example of the new look of the Common Knowledge Project
Another example of the new look of the Common Knowledge Project
We’re dedicated to supporting local newsrooms at every level of their reporting — from helping find, collect and visualize data, to searching through the data for stories. We know the importance of local news to communities and we’re invested in continuing to help local news publishers reach and engage audiences looking for their essential reporting.
In this post, we'll walk you through how kids, teens and families can make use of a new tool that gives minors more control over their images in Google Search. Because while we already provide a range of options for people seeking to remove content from Search, we know that kids and teens have to navigate some unique challenges online, especially when a picture of them is unexpectedly available on the internet.
With a newly implemented policy, anyone under the age of 18, or their parent or guardian, can now request the removal of their images from Search results, following a few simple steps. This means these images won’t appear in the Images tab or as thumbnails in any feature in Google Search.
If you’re under 18 and there’s an image of yourself that you want removed from Google results, you – or your parent, guardian or authorized representative – can follow these steps to request that it be removed:
It’s important to note that removing an image from Google results doesn’t remove it from the internet. That’s why you might want to contact a site’s webmaster to ask that they remove the content, too. You can learn more about how to do that on our support page.
We believe this change will help give young people more control over their digital footprint and where their images can be found on Search. Learn more about other ways we work to help kids and families stay safe while exploring information online.
At Google, we like to say that Search is not a solved problem: We’re constantly making improvements (more than 4,800 last year alone). These changes can be big launches or small tune-ups, but they’re all designed to make Search work better for you, and to make sure you can find relevant, high quality information when you need it.
One of the key ways we determine if an improvement to Search works well is through the help of search quality raters. This group of more than 10,000 people all over the world work from a common set of search quality rater guidelines used to evaluate the quality of search results — which are publicly available. Today, we wanted to give you an idea of how these guidelines work, and how — just like Search itself — they improve over time.
The quality rater guidelines are more than 170 pages long, but if we have to boil it down to one phrase, we’d say they help make sure Search is returning relevant results from the most reliable sources available.
Information quality is at the heart of Search, and our systems fundamentally work to surface high-quality information. The rater guidelines help raters determine if a planned improvement is meeting that goal by providing a clear, uniform definition that all raters use to assess the results they see.
More specifically, high-quality information is content which demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness on a topic, or E-A-T for short. For example, a health site with content from doctors and produced by a medical institution would have a high level of what many would consider to be expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The rater guidelines also define low-quality content on the web, such as content that spreads hate or seeks to deceive users.
As we noted, the changes we make to Search are rigorously tested and evaluated by real people. Our search quality raters provide us with insights and evaluate pages against our guidelines to help make sure our systems — and proposed improvements — are working as intended.
What that looks like in practice is often a “side-by-side” test where a rater will look at two sets of Search results, one from the current version of Google and the other from an improvement we’re testing. Raters will review the pages in each set of results, and evaluate if the pages are a helpful match for the query based on our rater guidelines.
The ratings they provide don’t directly impact how a page or site appears in Search. Instead, they help us measure how well our systems are working to deliver great content.
Just like we make improvements to Search, we update the rater quality guidelines from time to time to make sure they’re working as intended.
Some changes are meant to tackle issues we’ve identified in Search, and may include expanded sections and new examples to help guide raters. For example, in 2017, we updated our guidelines to provide more detailed examples of low-quality web pages that included misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes or other content.
Sometimes, we identify concepts that are especially challenging for raters. We then make changes to the guidelines to improve ratings. In 2020, for instance, we provided new guidance on how to tell if a result from a dictionary or encyclopedia would be useful for a certain query.
Other changes focus on things like refreshing the language for clarity and updating organization. That’s what made up most of our October 2021 update, which included clarifications of what constitutes lowest quality content, and refreshed and modernized guidance on researching the reputation of websites.
We rigorously review, test and evaluate all changes to ensure they’re helpful and having the intended effect. And we have a publicly available log at the end of our guidelines describing in detail any changes we make. Ultimately, these updates are designed to make Search work better for you.
Every day, billions of people come to Google to search for questions big and small. Whether it’s finding a recipe, looking for a local coffee shop or searching for information on complex topics like health, civics or finance, Google Search helps you get the information you need -- when you need it.
But part of accomplishing our mission also means making information open and accessible about how Google Search, itself, works. That’s why we’re transparent about how we design Search, how we improve it and how it works to get you the information you’re looking for.
Like many of the topics you might search for on Google, Search can seem complicated -- but we make it easy to learn about. Here are a few ways you can get a better understanding of how Google Search works:
Today, we’re launching a fully-redesigned How Search Works website that explains the ins and outs of Search -- how we approach the big, philosophical questions, along with the nitty-gritty details about how it all works.
We first launched this website in 2016, and since then, millions of people have used it to discover more about how Search works. Now, we've updated the site with fresh information, made it easier to navigate and bookmark sections and added links to additional resources that share how Search works and answer common questions.
The website gives you a window into what happens from the moment you start typing in the search bar to the moment you get your search results. It gives an overview of the technology and work that goes into organizing the world’s information, understanding what you’re looking for and then connecting you with the most relevant, helpful information.
On the site, you can find details about how Google’s ranking systems sort through hundreds of billions of web pages and other content in our Search index -- looking at factors like meaning, relevance, quality, usability and context -- to present the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second. And you can learn about how we go about making improvements to Search. (There have been 4,500 such improvements in 2020 alone!) As you’ll read about, we rigorously test these changes with the help of thousands of Search Quality Raters all around the world -- people who are highly trained using our extensive guidelines. These rater guidelines are publicly available, and they describe in great detail how Search works to surface great content.
We're always testing changes to Search to provide you with the most helpful results.
You also can watch our How Search Works video series, a set of easy-to-understand explainers about how Search connects you to helpful, relevant information. Here, you’ll find the answers to common questions like how Autocomplete works (no, it’s not mind-reading), how Google keeps you safe on Search, how ads appear in Search and more.
And if you’re really in the mood to learn all about Search -- and the real people behind the scenes who are working hard to make it better every single day -- you can watch our “home movie,” “Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers.” Grab your popcorn!
When it comes to the open web, we also invest heavily in helping site owners, publishers, businesses, creators and others succeed and get discovered on Search. At Google Search Central, creators can get expert advice from experienced webmasters, view over 1000+ educational videos, learn best practices for web development and discover many more tips to maximize their reach on Search.
Every day, we make changes to make Search work better -- some small, some large. We work hard to give site owners and content producers ample notice and advice about changes where there’s actionable information they can use. While we strive to provide as much information as we can, we also have a responsibility to protect the integrity of our results and keep results as clean as possible from search spam. That’s why, although we share a lot of information about Search updates, we can’t share every detail. Otherwise, bad actors would have the information they need to evade the protections we’ve put in place against deceptive, low-quality content.
Over the last two decades, Google Search has evolved tremendously, but one thing remains core to how we operate: transparency about our approach and commitment to providing universally accessible information to all. Explore our newly refreshed website to discover more as we continue to evolve.
Accessing timely, relevant and reliable information is increasingly important in our current environment. Whether you see something on social media or are having a conversation with a friend, you might turn to Google to learn more about a developing issue.
While Google Search will always be there with the most useful results we can provide, sometimes the reliable information you’re searching for just isn’t online yet. This can be particularly true for breaking news or emerging topics, when the information that’s published first may not be the most reliable.
To help with this, we’ve trained our systems to detect when a topic is rapidly evolving and a range of sources hasn’t yet weighed in. We’ll now show a notice indicating that it may be best to check back later when more information from a wider range of sources might be available.
Since last year, we’ve had similar notices that let you know when Google hasn’t been able to find anything that matches your search particularly well. With our recently-launched About This Result panel, you can also quickly find information about sources you find on Google Search and better determine if they’re likely to provide helpful or trustworthy information. With this additional context, you can make a more informed decision about the sites you may want to visit and what results will be most useful for you.
Across these features, our goal is to provide more context about your results so you can more confidently evaluate the information you find online. These new notices are rolling out in English in the U.S. to start, and we look forward to expanding these and other related features over the coming months.
