4 Important Changes Google Made in March

Google has released a list of 44 changes that it made to its search algorithm in the month of March. Unfortunately they were presented in a rather unfriendly blog post. Here are some of the highlights:

• %, $, \, ., @, #, and + are now recognized as normal characters so you can search for math equations.

• There is now improved search performance for Tennis, Russian Hockey, and UEFA Champions League games.

• App search is now platform-specific. So if you search for an app on your IPhone you will get different search results than if you search from an Android.

• Image search will now take the quality of the source page better into account to try and weed out spammers who are using popular images to rank.

None of these updates is earth shattering. They are mainly small tweaks and fixes. There is some frustratingly vague stuff in the list though, like this:

Improvements to processing for detection of site quality. [launch codename "Curlup"] We’ve made some improvements to a longstanding system we have to detect site quality. This improvement allows us to get greater confidence in our classifications.

With wording that vague they could sneak through serious algorithm updates. It makes you wonder. If they are going to be that vague why do they bother posting this list anyway? I guess the take away here is that if you're a Russian hockey fan or a High School math student your life just got a little easier...