Google rolled out an algorithm update last February, with no less than 40 changes reported, including improvements to travel-related searches [launch codename “nesehorn”]. According to an official release on Inside Search, Google made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for Google’s Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results. The Flight Search feature was developed in September 2011, to give Google users faster, more flexible, and more useful results for online travel searches.
Another important update for travel operator is the improved local results. Google launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. The new update detects when both queries and documents are local to the user.
There are also a number of country specific updates, including better triggering for Turkish weather search feature; improvements to ranking for local search results; improvements to freshness to surface fresh content in Google results even more quickly than before; international launch of shopping rich snippets; improvements to Korean spelling; more organized search results for Google Korea; refreshed per-URL country information; and more accurate detection of official pages. The complete list of updates, with detailed descriptions, can be found on Google’s Inside Search blog.
