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Google launched more than 1,600 new changes in search last year

Google has been busy with 1,653 launches, 9,800 live traffic experiments, 18,015 side-by-side experiments and 130,336 search quality tests.

Barry Schwartz on April 28, 2017 at 11:46 am

Google revamped its How Search Works site, the site they launched in 2013 to describe the efforts Google makes in search. Google added some new metrics around the various Google search launches they made last year, how many tests they tried out and the various numbers around their diverse set of search experiments.

Google mentioned the update to this site when they also announced Project Owl earlier this week.

The site shares that Google launched 1,653 new search changes last year, based on 9,800 live traffic experiments, 18,015 side-by-side experiments and 130,336 search quality tests.

As you can see, only a small percentage of what Google tries actually goes live, but to launch over 1,600 new changes in search in a single year is massive. In fact, we don’t know exactly how many of the 1,600 changes are user interface changes versus new feature changes versus algorithmic or ranking changes. I doubt Google would share those details.

What we do know is that only one percent of searchers were part of the 9,800 live traffic experiments and that while we likely covered many of them, I am sure we missed the majority of those experiments.

Here is an animated GIF of the page that documents these numbers:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 SEM topics.