Some information about Google (and sometimes Bing) and its search engine, gathered unofficially here and there over recent days, with this week’s program including some answers to these worrying questions: why does Google run so many tests each year? What role do quality raters play in site rankings? Why are unprecedented queries on Google good news for the web?
Google runs hundreds of thousands of tests each year to meet user expectations
At the Search Central Live NYC event, John Mueller explained that Google runs 700,000 tests per year, which amounts to more than 4,700 search engine updates. This therefore implies that many tests take place in parallel. This also means that when people check search results, they sometimes see things that are a little different. John Mueller also clarified that the purpose of all these updates was not to make people’s lives harder, but to meet users’ very high expectations.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Reliability rate: 
Agreed!
Even if it upsets many, the profusion of tests and updates carried out by Google, and the consequences these can have for sites, is one of the reasons explaining its leading position in many regions.
Goossip #2
It is not the quality raters' evaluations that directly determine rankings
During Search Central Live NYC, John Mueller also emphasized the importance of quality raters, those evaluators who judge the effectiveness of Google’s algorithm updates. Although these evaluations do not directly determine rankings, they help adjust ranking factors. John Mueller also insists on the need to read, at least once, the Google guidelines that quality raters use for their assessments.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Reliability rate: Agreed!
At a time when emphasis is often placed on the algorithm’s impact on ranking, it’s worth reiterating the central role evaluators play in this process.
Goossip #3
Stable, the percentage of novel queries on Google is good news for the web
Finally, John Mueller reaffirmed that 15% of the queries handled by Google are entirely new; a figure that remains stable over the years despite the rise of AI in search. To respond to these queries that cannot be anticipated, Google relies on various technologies, such as BERT, to better understand them, especially complex formulations: " So we have developed ways to return results for queries we cannot anticipate… In particular for longer, conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like "for" and "to" are important for meaning, the search engine will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural to you. " For John Mueller, these 15% of new queries also show that users continue to regularly search for new information, a sign of a dynamic and constantly evolving ecosystem.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Reliability rate: Agreed!
If the near-constant 15% of new queries is good news for the web, it is also good news for content creators who can take advantage of this opportunity to rank. That said, it is not always easy to anticipate topics sometimes tied to unpredictable news!
The article “Goossips SEO: Tests, Quality Raters, Unseen Queries” was published on the site Abundance.
