Google 'continually experimenting with search changes'

4th August 2008

Refining the Google search interface involves constant experimentation with both major and minor new features and changes, Google has revealed.

According to a post on the official Google blog from engineer Ben Gomes, the search engine is continuously tweaking the way in which search results are displayed, although the homepage itself remains the same.

He commented: "We have been making improvements to our snippets over time with algorithms for determining the relevance of portions of the page.

"The changes range from the subtle - we highlight synonyms of your query terms in the results - to [the] more obvious."

Mr Gomes also outlined the main principles behind improving Google search, including keeping the homepage simple to allow for quicker loading, implementing features that can work everywhere and making data-driven decisions.

Last month, Amit Singhal of Google said in another blog post that the company has made heavy investments in improving its crawl and indexing system over the last few years to enhance the size and freshness of the index.