Google has updated its ‘How Search Works’ website which contains information on how Google organizes, ranks, and tests search results.
The website was launched in 2016 and explains the inner workings of Google’s search engine in a way that even non-SEOs can understand it.
It’s an ideal resource to send to clients who know little to nothing about search. As a reader of Search Engine Journal, on the other hand, you may find the information a little basic.
One thing that does make the site worth checking out is the annual updates on search changes. The How Search Works site is updated every year with the latest data on Google’s tests and evaluations of search results.
The site currently includes data about 2020, a year when Google ran:
- 4,887 launches in search results
- 17,323 live traffic experiments
- 383,605 search quality tests
- 62,937 side-by-side experiments
If you’ve checked out Google’s How Search Works Site before, he’s what’s changed since you last saw it.
Google Redesigns How Search Works Site — What’s New?
Google says it’s launching a “fully-redesigned” How Search Works website. Cosmetically speaking, that appears to be true.
I spent some time combing through the redesigned site and comparing it side-by-side with a cached version. After trying to find some useful new insights to pull from the new version, I couldn’t uncover any changes to the content itself.
To be sure, the content was edited and the wording was tweaked, but there’s nothing new to learn from it.
The updated site contains all the same information, it’s just presented in a different way. To Google’s credit, however, the changes in presentation do come with usability improvements.
There’s a lot less clicking around in the redesigned How Search Works. Take the old page on search features, for example. This is what it looked like before :
Screenshot from web.archive.org, August 2021.As a visitor you would have to click on each one of those individually to learn about them, then hit the back button on your browser and click another one until you went through them all.
Google’s new page on search features allows you to consume all the content seamlessly by scrolling down the page. No clicking necessary.
In fairness, while I couldn’t find any new information on the updated site, what was already there was plenty sufficient
After writing a whole post announcing the redesign, Google’s Danny Sullivan got the news out on Twitter as well which made this feel like a major change.
If you looked at the site thinking, “what’s new?” The answer is: not a lot!
This is the kind of update that probably would have gone unnoticed had Google not said anything about it.
You can judge for yourself by perusing the updates to the How Search Works site.
