Evolution of the Google's Algorithm in 2010

Chronic of changes to the algorithm and result pages

Evolutions rated or announced of the algorithm of Google and the content of results pages, the SERPs.

It is a document in constant development. Dates are related to a document, but the effective change may be prior to it.

Microdata

Microdata as specified in HTML 5 are now included in the description of the results if they are defined in the page.
They adds social data about the site.

Microdata in snippets.
March 12, 2010.

Public data in search results

The search engine now provides access to public statistics and displays graphs directly instead of links, like Wolfram Alpha.
To do this, you type in the search bar keywords like "unemployment rate " with the name of a country or region and the image of a graph is displayed under a link to click.
You can check with "unemployement rate usa" that things are not going very well in USA.
This service works only for USA in March 2010.

More information and video.
March 9, 2010.

Assigning stars to results

Google abandons the SearchWiki service which imitated the principles of Wikia and allowed users to annotate, vote for or delete pages in results. (Wikia dropped this service for a while).
But it retains a feature that is extended to the general search engine: the user can assign a star to a link in results. When he returned on the search engine, links that received a star appear at top of the page ion a special list.
This rating is personal, it does not change the results for other users.

More details.
February 4, 2010.

Local Search option

A new option "Nearby" appears in the panel of specialized search. It restricts searches to regions.
The advantage is that the search will no longer depend precisely on keywords but on a region, without the need to found all the different terms used to designate towns and various places...

Refine your search by location.
February 26, 2010.

Search engine and answers

To add the feature of the Wolfram Alpha engine, Google now wants to offer real answers to questions from webmasters. For this it offers a richer snippet (description under the link in results) and includes the response in bold.
Clearly, if we ask how many people are living in China, the snippet should contain the answer. What we can easily check ...

The difference with Wolfram is that the user can click on the link for more details. In addition, the snippet has a limited size, while Wolfram can provide an answer on a full page ... that the Web site linked by Google can also do. Webmasters may have to change their writing habits to adapt to that.
For example, to use Ajax to give to his visitors an unique information. If the information is not unique, they will find it in snippets of other sites and it is not recommended.

Explanation: Answer highlighting.
January 2010.

The speed of a site will be a ranking factor in 2010

This is what Matt Cutts has just said in an interview.

"Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast.
It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much.
I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about 'how do I have my site be fast, how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?"

This should favor static website with no SQL. See our article, How to build a CMS without database.