Friday, August 12, 2011

Cross-posted on theInside Search blog

For many months, we've been focused on trying toreturn high-quality sites to users. Earlier this year, we rolled out our "Panda" change forsearches in English around the world. Today we're continuing that effort by rolling out our algorithmic search improvements in different languages. Ourscientific evaluation data show that this change improves our search quality across the board and the response to Panda from users has been very positive.

For most languages, this change impacts typically 6-9% of queries to a degree that a user might notice. This is distinctly lower than the initial launch of Panda, which affected almost 12% of English queries to a noticeable amount. We are launching this change for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, where we continue to test improvements.

For sites that are affected by this algorithmic change, we have a post providing guidance onhow Google searches for high-quality sites. We also have webmaster forums inmany languages for publishers who wish to give additional feedback and get advice. We'll continue working to do the right thing for our users and serve them the best results we can.

Posted byAmit Singhal, Google Fellow