Yay! Google takes aim at copycats with search refinements

The search Goliath, Google, has been pushing out various product updates at a relentless pace throughout much of this year. For example, they redesigned the main navigation bar, updated the Search app for iOS and are testing new ‘Sources’ section inside of search results, all the while catering to the bright side of technology with notable gems such as this 6-minute clip touching on the history and future of search.

But the company isn’t resting on its laurels as today they made known in a blog post a number of enhancements to their key product, the Google.com search engine. It’s been improved with nearly a dozen new capabilities since the last update on November 14, most of which aim to protect original content on the web.

Google now indexes more long-tail documents and has more accurate autocomplete predictions described as being “a little more flexible for certain queries, without losing your original intention”. They’re also better at figuring out which of two similar web pages is the original one. As a result, shady sites blatantly lifting content that hard-working bloggers produce should have a lesser chance of appearing in search results.

Other refinements include live results for Major League Soccer and the Canadian Football League, minor color and layout changes to improve usability on tablet devices, a change to how they determine image freshness for news queries so they can find the freshest images more often and other under-the-hood tweaks.

With those changes in place, users should benefit from more relevant search experience freed from lifted content that sneaks its way into their search results.