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Google Algo Updates for September:
Some of these algorithm changes were part of the Google Panda 20 update which was a significant update that Affected 2.4% of all English queries.
Dot. [project “Autocomplete”] We improved cursor-aware predictions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. Suppose you’re searching for “restaurants” and then decide you want “Italian restaurants.” With cursor-aware predictions, once you put your cursor back to the beginning of the search box and start typing “I,” the prediction system will make predictions for “Italian,” not completions of “Irestaurants.”
#84288. [project “Autocomplete”] This change made improvements to show more fresh predictions in autocomplete for Korean.
trafficmaps. [project “Universal Search”] With this change, we began showing a traffic map for queries like “traffic from A to B” or “traffic between A and B.”
#84394. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
#84652. [project “Snippets”] We currently generate titles for PDFs (and other non-html docs) when converting the documents to HTML. These auto-generated titles are usually good, but this change made them better by looking at other signals.
#83761. [project “Freshness”] This change helped you find the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant for a given search query.
#83406. [project “Query Understanding”] We improved our ability to show relevant Universal Search results by better understanding when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.
espd. [project “Autocomplete”] This change provided entities in autocomplete that are more likely to be relevant to the user’s country. See blog post for background.
#83391. [project “Answers”] This change internationalized and improved the precision of the symptoms search feature.
#82876. [project “Autocomplete”] We updated autocomplete predictions when predicted queries share the same last word.
#83304. [project “Knowledge Graph”] This change updated signals that determine when to show summaries of topics in the right-hand panel.
#84211. [project “Snippets”] This launch led to better snippet titles.
#81360. [project “Translation and Internationalization”] With this launch, we began showing local URLs to users instead of general homepages where applicable (e.g. blogspot.ch instead of blogspot.com for users in Switzerland). That’s relevant, for example, for global companies where the product pages are the same, but the links for finding the nearest store are country-dependent.
#81999. [project “Translation and Internationalization”] We revamped code for understanding which documents are relevant for particular regions and languages automatically (if not annotated by the webmaster).
Cobra. [project “SafeSearch”] We updated SafeSearch algorithms to better detect adult content.
#937372. [project “Other Search Features”] The translate search tool is available through the link “Translated foreign pages” in the sidebar of the search result page. In addition, when we guess that a non-English search query would have better results from English documents, we’ll show a feature at the bottom of the search results page to suggest users try the translate search tool. This change improved the relevance of when we show the suggestion.
#84460. [project “Snippets”] This change helped to better identify important phrases on a given webpage.
#80435. [project “Autocomplete”] This change improves autocomplete predictions based on the user’s Web History (for signed-in users).
#83901. [project “Synonyms”] This change improved the use of synonyms for search terms to more often return results that are relevant to the user’s intention.