Google is making a significant improvement to its ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give users more up-to-date relevant results.
The new algorithm is built on the company's "Caffeine" web indexing system, implemented by Google last year, which allows the company to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale.
Search results, even if the the users do not specify it in their searches, will be more relevant and recent, Google said.
"The most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old," Google said in a blog post. "Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you?ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old," the company added.
For some events that take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as an event like the presidential election, Google's search results will present the most recent event without needing users to specify it with their keywords.
There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn't really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if a user is researching for the "best slr cameras", he or she will want the most up to date information. On the other hand, there are plenty of cases where results that are a few years old might still be useful for users. Google says that the latest algorithmic improvement has been designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness users need.
Google's latest updates could be an important part of Google's strategy to keep ahead of search rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing search engine.
In August, the search giant's U.S. market share slipped below 65 percent for the first time in two months. According to comScore, an Internet tracker, Google inched back from 64.8 percent in August to 65.3 percent in September.