Google Makes One Change Per Day To Search Algorithm

Apr 22, 2010 at 2:55pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google’s Matt Cutts just posted a video on YouTube answering the question, “how many search algorithm changes were made in 2009?” In response to that question, Matt said Google likely makes a change per day to the search algorithm. They don’t necessarily release those changes each day, but they will release them in batches. But overall, he hopes to average at least one change per day to the algorithm. He said in 2009, they probably had between 350 to 400 or so changed to the search algorithm.

A few months ago we covered a Wired story on Google’s algorithm where Udi Manber, Google’s head of search said Google has introduced 550 “improvements” to the search algorithm in the past year alone. So I guess Matt was being conservative with his math?

Here is the video:

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Top News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/heel-tastic-review-amp-free-trial-2160635.html warrenleona

Nice post… and it is a good thing Google is changing rankingfactors daily. However… sometimes it seems it has no real effect at all and spam is growing like weed in it’s engine. I thus think they will not be able to create the perfect engine.

http://twitter.com/warrenleona
http://www.thesearchagents.com Bradd Libby

In ‘Computer Mediated Transactions’ (March 6, 2010), Google’s chief economist Hal Varian said:

“In 2008, Google ran 6,000 experiments involving web search which re-
sulted in 450-500 changes in the system. Some of these were experiments with
the user interface, some were basic changes to the algorithm. The ads team at Google ran a similar number of experiments, tweaking everything from the background color of the ads, to the spacing between the ads and search results, to the underlying ranking algorithm.”

Similar numbers were quoted by Amit Singhal.