Google claims it reduced irrelevant search results by over 50% in seven years

Google Search has reduced the irrelevant results shown in Google Search by over 50% in the last seven years, the search company announced. With that, Google also dropped another nugget of information saying they have seen a more than 60% increase in natural language queries.

Irrelevant results. Google is constantly making changes to Google Search. In 2021, Google said it made more than 5,000 improvements to search and ran more than 800,000 experiments. For comparison, in 2020 Google revealed it made 4,887 changes to search.

Google’s changes and experiments are all aimed at improving search quality and relevancy. Google said that the 50% decrease in irrelevant search results over the past seven years is measured based on internal metrics based on quality rater data. There is no independent source for this metric, but these are internal metrics Google uses to measure the relevancy of its own search results.

Natural language queries. The other metric, that there is over a 60% increase in people entering queries into the Google search box using natural language is interesting. Google said that they have “seen people’s search queries evolve, too.” “Since 2015, we’ve seen a more than 60% increase in natural language queries in search,” Google wrote.

So if you write your content, like people normally write and speak, then you should do well in Google Search. Google wrote “this means people can find what they need more easily, and using language that’s closer to the way we normally write and speak.”

Why we care. One thing we can expect from Google is constant change. This change is not for the sake of change itself but rather for improving search quality and relevancy. That means the bar for ranking your site high in Google Search continues to be raised.

SEO and search have evolved over the past 25 years, shortcuts are hard to come by these days. Working hard on quality, writing like humans are reading that content and providing the best user experience and content is something that should not be laughed at in 2022.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.