New Delhi [India], Apr 27 : Aiming to deliver more long-term and impactful changes to Search, Google on Wednesday announced key updates to its algorithms and introduced additional features to address the challenges with locating relevant from the most reliable sources available.

Google has made structural changes in Search that include improvements in ranking, easier ways for people to provide direct feedback, and greater transparency around how Search works.

To help prevent the spread of offensive or misleading content that has been known to surface in a small subset of queries, Google has improved its evaluation methods and made algorithmic updates that surface more authoritative content.

As part of the process, Google is taking feedback from real people who assess the quality of Google's search results and give their feedback on our experiments. These ratings don't determine individual page rankings, but are used to help them gather data on the quality of our results and identify areas for improvement.

Last month, Google updated its Search Quality Rater Guidelines to provide more detailed examples of low-quality webpage for raters to appropriately flag, which can include misleading information, unexpected offensive results and unsupported conspiracy theories.

These guidelines are expected to help the algorithms in demoting such low-quality content and help make additional improvements over time.

Google uses hundreds of signals to determine which results are shown for a given query-from the freshness of the content, to the number of times user search queries appear on the page. These signals have been adjusted to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content.

In order to bring greater transparency, Google recently updated its 'How Search Works' site to provide more information to users and website owners about the technology behind Search.

The site includes a description of how Google ranking systems sort through hundreds of billions of pages to return your results, as well as an overview of our user testing process.

In addition, Google has published updates to its policy to the Help Center so anyone can learn more about Autocomplete and Google's approach to removals. (ANI)