Google has rolled out a great number of small changes to the search engine and UI over the last month, and now they have rolled them all into a big blog post for your consecutive enjoyment.
We’ve highlighted a few that seemed more relevant, but there isn’t much here that’s life-changing. All the same, it’s good to stay up on changes like this, just in case you happen to do SEO for a living (scoundrel).
- “+” is now treated as a normal character when that seems to be the intent, along with %, $, \, ., @, and #. Its days as an operator are probably over, though, except when you’re using it in an equation.
- Changing your password now logs you out from all your Google stuff, including Search.
- Better answers and live scores for Tennis, Russian Hockey, and UEFA Champions League games.
- Platform-specific results for app search – so if you search for Angry Birds, you’ll get different results on Android, iOS, and so on. Results are also richer, with stars, download buttons, reviews, etc.
- The “Freshness update” that brought recent and differently-organized results to News searches has been rolled out more generally, apparently as a result of having acquired the “machine resources” to do so.
- Image search has gotten a handful of updates, including relevancy, better ratings for the quality of the source page (fewer trash pages Google-bombing with popular images, presumably), and Safesearch changes.
- The +1 button will show in search results in more countries and domains.
