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Google Does a Barrel Roll and Revamps “Freshness” Search Algorithm
It’s been a fun week for Google with the discovery of a cute web FX trick that causes the search engine to “do a barrel roll” and the revamp of their algorithm that will boost the likelihood that fresher content will find its way to the top.
The official Google blog is now abuzz with the revamp of their search engine to allow for fresher news items to appear in the indexes, at higher positions, sooner. These modifications build upon Google’s Caffeine search engine technology that the search giant announced last year that will greatly increase it’s ability to surface recent, relevant information.
A person searching for current news and information on the current engine might feel frustrated that they’re seeing results from last year (or earlier) due to their relevance to the search topic; when really, when people go looking for news, they’re not peering into the archives of our past, they want to know what’s going on now. As a result—and I’ve fallen for it myself—I’ve had to add a date to my search query after realizing the search I’d received gave me everything and not things from very recent.
Google has sought to correct this thought-issue in how searchers might address information and here’s the highlights of how they’re doing it:
- Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.
- Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [exxon earnings], you’ll see the latest information.
- Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.
Of course, not all search topics will be given the maximum freshness treatment; there are still search topics that don’t have much relevance to the here-and-now. As a result, this treatment will probably only impact the top 35% of all searches, while the rest will be left to their own devices.
Google: Do a barrel roll!
Even if you’re not up to pace with Internet memes or old video-games, you might have heard the phrase “Do a barrel roll!” before. This is a reference to the now-vintage video game Star Fox developed for the Super Nintendo. The meme burst out of the game as one of the characters would repeatedly call for the player to press the button sequence to spin their spacecraft (and thus avoid incoming enemy lasers.) Among the anthropomorphic animals in the game, the command came from a hare character named Peppy.
In common parlance, a barrel roll is an aircraft areal combat maneuver emerged during early dogfighting in World War I that involves rolling the plane wing-over-wing.
Type the phrase into the Google search and that’s exactly what the search results do.
Curious about how the engineers over at Google pulled off this trick, Brian Sage at Acumen Brands Company blog investigated.
It looks like Google used 10 lines of CSS3 code to execute the “barrel roll” trick visible to users who run Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera—sorry, Internet Explorer, it just won’t work for you. The CSS3 code basically tells the <body> tag (i.e. where all the content is) to transform itself in a rotation across 360° degrees and then stop there.
The result is hilarious.
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