Google Updates Search Algorithm and Panda
Increasing diversity is a term you’d normally expect to see in relation to Higher Education but now Google is getting in on the act with its own attempts to spread diversity (presumably timed to coincide with the Jewish New Year…).
Quite apart from any effort to improve racial harmony, Google wants its search results to come from a more diverse range on domains and has issued an algorithm update to achieve this. The aim of the update is that users find a wider variety of sites when searching, rather than seeing a number of results from the same domain. Google’s Matt Cutts (via twitter) announced it thus:
“Just fyi, we rolled out a small algo change this week that improves the diversity of search results in terms of different domains returned.”
image: George Lu on Flickr
The diversity algorithm update was followed by a new Panda update which was announced 18th September. This was a minor update which according to Google was expected to impact only around 0.7% of searches.