Google Will Start Ranking Passages

Source: Google

At Search On 2020 virtual event, Google announced:

“We’ve recently made another breakthrough, and are now able to not just index webpages, but individual passages from those pages.”

Right off the bat, this announcement felt strange to us, so we’ve dug into the matter. Soon enough, we learned that Google will actually start ranking passages better. Once they roll out this update later this year, they’ll be able to better extract and rank relevant passages from long pages.

So it’s not that Google will start indexing parts of pages. They’ll still index full pages, but they’ll do it slightly differently, as they need to be able to serve up the relevant passages.

This is big, as Google said it will impact 7% of search queries worldwide.

We’ve applied neural nets to understand subtopics around an interest, which helps deliver a greater diversity of content when you search for something broad. As an example, if you search for “home exercise equipment,” we can now understand relevant subtopics, such as budget equipment, premium picks, or small space ideas, and show a wider range of content for you on the search results page. We’ll start rolling this out by the end of this year.

Read more here.