Google has outlined a few of the features it has added during the last 12 months to deliver “reliable information” to users on a regular basis.
In an official blog post, Google said that a “high-quality search experience” is at the core of everything that it works and strives for and that it continues to make changes to better understand the quality of content across the web.
Rather than announce any fresh additions to search, Google summarised what it has done recently to improve the experience.
It noted that BERT, a technique for natural language processing (NLP), is now being deployed in the ‘Full Coverage’ features in the news stories section to check the facts and statistics presented in articles.
This tech has also supported its fact-check label system, which has now been shown to users on 4bn occasions already this year in several sections of search, including News and Google Images.
Google is also surfacing fresh news stories in a shorter timeframe.
It revealed that breaking news queries can be detected in just several minutes, a notable improvement on the 40+ minutes it generally took in the past.
Publishers that are able to demonstrate E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) through timely and relevant news, blogs and articles are more likely to see their content displayed for breaking stories.
Google is also working more closely with Wikipedia to prevent articles on the popular site from being vandalised.
Google noted: “To complement Wikipedia’s systems, we’ve added additional protections and detection systems to prevent potentially inaccurate information from appearing in knowledge panels.”
The search giant concluded its post by reminding SEOs and webmasters that they can find out the latest benchmarks and criteria in the updated Search Quality Raters Guidelines.
