Google said in a spotlight piece of Danny Sullivan's 25 year career in search (which is a nice thing) that Google reduced irrelevant search results by more than half in the past seven years. Google measured that number by looking at its own internal quality raters metrics.
"Over the last seven years, our internal metrics based on quality rater data show we've decreased the number of irrelevant results by over 50%," Danny Sullivan of Google said. Danny was interviewed by Jennifer Kutz, a Google PR individual.
I suspect no one would argue that the search results, quality overall, has improved in the past seven years. Remember the junk that ranked several years ago?
Another interesting stat was that searchers are searching more naturally, 60% more naturally. Google said "since 2015, we've seen a more than 60% increase in natural language queries in Search. This means people can find what they need more easily, and using language that's closer to the way we normally write and speak." Again, this has to be from internal data and Google looking at how people search today versus how they searched several years ago. People use to use AND, OR, etc search query parameters to improve their searches in the older days - now people just search as if they are talking to you.
Finally, Google has made over "more than 5,000 in 2021 alone" to Google Search. This figure is up from 4,500 in 2020 and then in 2019 Google made only 3,200 changes and in 2018, it was also about 3,200. Google also said they "conducted more than 800,000 experiments and ongoing quality tests to make sure the results we deliver."
I love this reaction tweet to the 800,000 experiments metric and no, Danny Sullivan did not reply to it. But I suspect the answer is, machines do and measure the experiments.
So there is a lot of change and the change is aimed at reducing irrelevant search results, improving quality and making search easier for searchers to use.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
