On the 24th of February, Google made the announcement of two new improvements made to their search results. These Google search improvements included:

1. an expanded list of useful related searches – the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page.

For example, if you type in something like “sydney restaurants guide” in to the search box on Google; at the top or bottom of the results page, you will see ‘Searches related to sydney restaurants guide’ which provides more relevant key phrases.

What Google have done is they’ve deployed a new technology based on the 2006 acquisition of “Orion” which can better understand associations and concepts related to a particular search.

So taking the same example of “sydney restaurants guide”, the related terms shown by Google include “sydney thai restaurants” or “café sydney restaurant”.

This update has been rolled out for other languages too, as detailed in the Google blogs, where they state “We are now able to target more queries, more languages, and make our suggestions more relevant to what you actually need to know.”

2. the addition of longer search result descriptions – so when you enter a longer query (more than three words), usually you are presented with a regular-length snippet which may not give you enough information and context. Hence Google has increased the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page.

Another example to show you how this works; if you look up “thai restaurants found in the city” into Google search, the search results will include a variety of results with two to three line snippets.

Ultimately, these Google algorithm updates have been launched to help users find the information they are looking for, more efficiently.