We have switched on an improved algorithm. This includes two major changes that provide improvement to:
general relevancy
navigational searches
This should improve overall rankings, as shown in testing, And it has benefitted from the recent user feedback via the evaluator - thank you. Further feedback is, as always, welcome but particularly so with this change.
Navigational searches can sometimes be negatively impacted by this update. So please let us know when this happens or you encounter issues. You can test again the the old algorithm using &m=152.
This is not (yet) the default for the API but can be switched on with m=168.
For me the search relevance but also date, I’ve had problems being able to get the latest response that is also relevant. Maybe that’s just it on my phone. Thanks Neal
Yes @Neal_Palmer, you are correct. Date relevancy is a an area we can definitely improve a lot. We have been working on it. As it happens, it’s a surprisingly difficult challenge. Publishers date stamping is highly non-homogeneous, even when it’s included. And if for example a footer changes on a page, should we record a new time stamp. I could go on and on… Anyway, we are giving this more attention now, after shipping on the improvements above which did not include any date relevance changes.
This is a great change and I’ve seen a bump in relevant results. But at least once, I’ve found the result I wanted in the “likely not relevant” section. Most of the time this doesn’t happen. Forgot to report it when it did though!
Yes, feedback on this would be particularly appreciated. We will be improving where it is positioned, and nothing better than specific examples to explore and test that. The boundary will always be subjective, of course, but still. Examples that stand out clearly are best.