The web is home to a lot of great things. But it is also a place where bad actors can try to take advantage of you or access your personal information. That's why we're always working to keep you safe while you search, and also to give you the tools to take control of your Search experience.  

Here are five ways we're making Google the safer way to search: 

1. Fighting spam

The last thing you want to worry about when you’re looking for cake recipes or researching a work project is landing on a malicious website where your identity might get stolen. It’s our job to help protect you from that, and it’s one we take very seriously. 

In 2020, we detected 40 billion pages of spam every day — including sites that have been hacked or deceptively created to steal your personal information — and blocked them from appearing in your results. Beyond traditional webspam, we’ve expanded our effort to protect you against other types of abuse like scams and fraud. Since 2018, we’ve been able to protect hundreds of millions of searches a year from ending up on scammy sites that try to deceive you with keyword stuffing, logos of brands they're imitating or a scam phone number they want you to call. 

We’re also providing web creators with resources to understand potential website vulnerabilities and better protect their sites, as well as tools to see if their sites have been hacked. This work is helping the entire web stay safer, and making it easier for you to land on safe sites with great experiences. To learn more about our work to fight spam on Search, read our 2020 Webspam Report.

2. Encrypting searches 

We also safeguard you from more than spam. We use encryption to prevent hackers and unwanted third parties from seeing what you are looking up or accessing your information. All searches made on google.com or in the Google app are protected by encrypting the connection between your device and Google, keeping your information safer.  

3. Helping you learn more about your
results before you click 

Another way we protect users is by giving you the tools and context to learn more about your Search results. Let’s say you’re searching for something and find a result from a source you aren’t familiar with. By clicking on the three dots next to your result, you can see website descriptions, when Google first indexed the site, and whether or not a site’s connection is secure. This added context enables you to make a more informed decision about the source before clicking the blue link.

4. Browsing safely 

Sometimes in the excitement of trying to learn more about a topic, you end up clicking on a link to a dangerous site without even realizing it. But with Google Safe Browsing, we’ve got you covered. This feature currently protects over four billion devices and when enabled in Chrome, displays warning messages letting you know that the site you are trying to enter might be unsafe, protecting you and your personal information from potential malware and phishing scams. 

5. Protecting you from bad ads

Providing you access to high-quality and reliable information on Search also extends to the ads you see while searching for products, services and content. To ensure those ads aren’t scams or being misused, we are constantly developing and enforcing policies that put users first. In 2020, we blocked or removed approximately 3.1 billion ads for violating our policies and restricted an additional 6.4 billion ads, across all of our platforms including Search. 

All of these tools were created with you in mind, so you can click on that carrot cake recipe knowing that we are working hard to help keep you safe online.

I've never spent as much time at home as I have in the last year. Of course, I'm not the only one. Over the past year or so of quarantine, I've found myself searching for new things to do. I searched for “cheesemaking” when my kids asked me to play sous chef, and for “bird watching” and “how to create container gardens” when we started spending more time outside.  Like so many people, I looked up recipes for baking bread. My quarantine search history feels like a bingo card for hobbies. 

This made me wonder what other people were searching for during the pandemic — and  how have these interests changed over time? 

Explore more by searching for specific hobbies in the calendar or click to select different dates and view what hobby was keeping us busy at that time last year. (It’s nice to know I wasn’t the only one searching for “needlepoint” on April 8 last year.) You can even select a specific hobby and connect with helpful information on the Search results page.

Google Trends provides a unique perspective of what we’re currently interested in and curious about. If I learned anything from using this new tool, it’s that we all have more in common than we might think.

You’d hardly know it from the way Google Search works, but nearly 20 years after introducing our first spell-check system, spelling remains an ongoing challenge of language understanding. Before we can even begin to start looking for relevant results for a search query, we have to know what a user is looking for, spelled correctly. But every day, one out of 10 search queries is misspelled, and new words are constantly being introduced, along with new ways to misspell them. If you’ve ever been guilty of misspelling a search only to get what you were looking for anyway, read on to learn more about the ABCs of spelling in Google Search. 

A is for All about common spelling mistakes

Our spelling mistakes tend to fall into two main categories: conceptual and slip-of-finger mistakes. We make conceptual mistakes when we’re unsure of how to spell something and try to take our best guess. Say you want to look up the meaning of “gobbledygook” and you don’t know exactly how to spell it, which wouldn’t be unusual since it’s both a difficult to spell word and has two commonly accepted spellings, including “gobbledegook.” In this case, we’ll see many best-effort spellings of the word like “garbledygook,” “gobblydegook,” “gobbleygook,” “gobbly gook,” and more.

Slip-of-finger spelling errors happen when we know how to spell what we’re looking for, but accidentally mistype it. Most of us have probably experienced this, especially since the rise of the smartphone, but it happens when we’re typing on full-size keyboards, too. This is why we see over 10,000 variations of queries like “YouTube,” all made by the accidental slip of a finger, such as “ytoube,” “7outub,” “yoitubd” and “tourube.”

B is for Better models to solve for the unknown

Despite how common our mistakes are, many misspelled queries appear only once, making spelling a unique challenge for Search. And regardless of what kind of spelling error was made, our systems find ways to understand what you mean. Previously, to solve for these never-before-seen misspellings, our systems found inspiration in the keyboard design. For example, if you tried to type "u" but made a mistake, our systems learned you were more likely to have typed "y" than "z" because "y" is adjacent to "u" on a standard English language keyboard. Our models applied the general concept to all new misspellings, walking down nearby letter replacements until a popular replacement term was identified. While this may have seemed like an obvious way to solve for slip-of-finger mistakes, this general approach effectively corrected all kinds of spelling errors, including conceptual mistakes. 

Thanks to advancements in deep learning, we now have a better way to understand spelling. Late last year, we announced a new spelling algorithm that uses a deep neural net that better models and learns from less-common and unique spelling mistakes. This advancement enables us to run a model with more than 680 million parameters in under two milliseconds — a very large model that works faster than the flap of a hummingbird’s wings — so people can search uninterrupted by their own spelling errors. 

And how do our systems know what someone is looking for, no matter the type of mistake and if we’ve never seen the misspelling before? This is where context comes into play. Our natural language understanding models look at a search in context, like the relationship that words and letters within the query have to each other. Our systems start by deciphering or trying to understand your entire search query first. From there, we generate the best replacements for the misspelled words in the query based on our overall understanding of what you’re looking for. For example, we can tell from the other words in the query “average home coast” that you’re probably looking for information on “average home cost.” 

C is for Correcting your query — nicely

You might see these spelling technologies pop up in Google Search in different ways. When we’re pretty sure we know what you’re looking for, we may politely ask, “did you mean…” and show the alternative we think you intended to search for. When we’re very confident that we’ve correctly identified your misspelling, we’ll automatically show results for what we think you’re looking for -- but we’ll always let you know and provide a way to get back to your original spelling. And whether you take our suggestion or not, we’re constantly learning and improving our systems based on that feedback to make Search more helpful.

So whether you’re a spelling bee champ or can't quite nail “I before E except after C,” we'll always be working to improve our spelling so you can keep searching. 

This week, we saw some discussion about a claim that the majority of searches on Google end without someone clicking off to a website — or what some have called “zero-click” searches. As practitioners across the search industry have noted, this claim relies on flawed methodology that misunderstands how people use Search. In reality, Google Search sends billions of clicks to websites every day, and we’ve sent more traffic to the open web every year since Google was first created. And beyond just traffic, we also connect people with businesses in a wide variety of ways through Search, such as enabling a phone call to a business. 

To set the record straight, we wanted to provide important context about this misleading claim.

How people use Search 

People use Search to find a wide range of information, and billions of times per day, Google Search sends someone to a website. But not every query results in a click to a website, and there are a lot of very good reasons why:

People reformulate their queries

People don’t always know how to word their queries when they begin searching. They might start with a broad search, like “sneakers” and, after reviewing results, realize that they actually wanted to find “black sneakers.” In this case, these searches would be considered a “zero-click” — because the search didn’t result immediately in a click to a website. In the case of shopping for sneakers, it may take a few “zero-click” searches to get there, but if someone ultimately ends up on a retailer site and makes a purchase, Google has delivered a qualified visitor to that site, less likely to bounce back dissatisfied.

Because this happens so frequently, we offer many features (like “related searches” links) to help people formulate their searches and get to the most helpful result, which is often on a website.

People look for quick facts

People look for quick, factual information, like weather forecasts, sports scores, currency conversions, the time in different locations and more. As many search engines do, we provide this information directly on the results page, drawing from licensing agreements or tools we’ve developed. These results are helpful for users, and part of our ongoing work to make Google Search better every day.

In 2020, for example, we showed factual information about important topics like COVID and the U.S. elections, which generated some of the most interest we’ve ever seen on Search. Our elections results feature was seen billions of times, delivering high-quality information in real time as people awaited the outcome. We also provided factual information about COVID symptoms in partnership with the WHO and local health authorities, making critical information readily accessible and upholding our responsibility to fight against potential misinformation online. 

People connect with a business directly

When it comes to local businesses, we provide many ways for consumers to connect directly with businesses through Google Search, many of which don’t require a traditional click. As an example, people might search for business hours, then drive to the store after confirming a location is open. Or they find restaurants on Google and call for information or to place an order, using phone numbers we list. On average, local results in Search drive more than 4 billion connections for businesses every month. This includes more than 2 billion visits to websites as well as connections like phone calls, directions, ordering food and making reservations.

We also help the many local businesses that don’t have their own website. Through Google My Business, businesses can create and manage their own page on Google, and get found online. Each month, Google Search connects people with more than 120 million businesses that don’t have a website. 

People navigate directly to apps

Some searches take people directly to apps, rather than to websites. For example, if you search for a TV show, you'll see links to various streaming providers like Netflix or Hulu. If you have that streaming app on your phone, these links will take you directly into the app. The same is true for many other apps, such as Instagram, Amazon, Spotify and more.

More opportunity for websites and businesses

We send billions of visits to websites every day, and the traffic we’ve sent to the open web has increased every year since Google Search was first created. 

Over the years, we’ve worked to constantly improve Google Search by designing and rolling out helpful features to help people quickly find what they’re looking for, including maps, videos, links to products and services you can buy directly, flight and hotel options, and local business information like hours of operation and delivery services. In doing so, we’ve dramatically grown the opportunity for websites to reach people. In fact, our search results page, which used to show 10 blue links, now shows an average of 26 links to websites on a single search results page on mobile. 

Building for the future of the web

We care deeply about the open web and have continually improved Google Search over the years, helping businesses, publishers and creators thrive. Some would argue that we should revert back to showing only 10 blue website links. While we do show website links for many queries today when they are the most helpful response, we also want to build new features that organize information in more helpful ways than just a list of links. And we’ve seen that as we’ve introduced more of these features over the last two decades, the traffic we’re driving to the web has also grown — showing that this is helpful for both consumers and businesses.