Although I am tired of Google saying they make thousands of changes per year to search, I do like when they release updated numbers here. Yesterday, Danny Sullivan from Google published a blog post saying Google made 3,200 changes to its search systems last year. As I said on Search Engine Land last night when I covered this, Google also informed us they updated the how search works data with that a few months ago.
Google wrote:
Our search algorithms are complex math equations that rely on hundreds of variables, and last year alone, we made more than 3,200 changes to our search systems. Some of these were visible launches of new features, while many others were regular updates meant to keep our results relevant as content on the web changes. And some are also improvements based on issues we identified, either via public reports or our own ongoing quality evaluations.
That is about 9 changes per day to search. How many of those changes are core ranking versus changing the pixel location of the search box or font sizes is unknown. But they are changes to search. But I wish Google would say how many ranking changes they make per year.
The new numbers now say "In 2018, we ran over 654,680 experiments, with trained external Search Raters and live tests, resulting in more than 3234 improvements to Search." That is 595,429 search quality tests; 44,155 side-by-side experiments; 15,096 live traffic experiments and 3,234 Launches.
In 2016 Google said they pushed 16,000 code commits per workday. In 2015, John Mueller said thousands of updates per day, but Google does core updates every couple to few months or so and there are some daily updates as well.
Are you making changes to your site to keep up with the Google changes?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
