Google LLC will update its search engine to display high-quality content more prominently in search results pages.

The update will begin rolling out next week, Google detailed in its announcement of the move today. It’s the latest in a series of enhancements that the company has released since the start of the year to improve its search engine.

With the latest set of improvements, Google hopes to “tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people,” Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, wrote in a blog post today. “This ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low-quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search.”

Google has already begun testing the update internally. Based on its testing, the company expects that the changes will provide particularly significant improvements when users enter queries related to online education, arts, entertainment, shopping and technology.

Google plans to begin rolling out the update next week with initial support for English search queries. A few weeks later, the company intends to release another enhancement focused on product reviews. The enhancement is designed to make it easier for users to find high-quality product reviews when researching a potential purchase.

Google’s announcement of the upcoming search improvements comes a few days after the company upgraded its search engine’s featured snippet capability. The capability displays a panel with information relevant to the user’s query above search results. To ensure that the text in the panel is accurate, Google has rolled out a neural network capable of comparing featured snippets with information from other sources. 

Google regularly updates its search engine with more iterative upgrades that don’t significantly change the user experience, but help improve the overall quality of search results. According to the company, it released thousands of such improvements last year. Google also carried out more than more than 800,000 feature experiments and quality tests.

Besides improving the relevance of search results, Google also invests in streamlining the user experience provided by its search engine. In 2019, it added a neural network that has helped increase the accuracy of search results for about one in 10 queries. More recently, Google last year added a feature that enables users to access reviews and other contextual information about a website directly from a search results page. 

Google runs its search engine partly on its internally developed Cloud TPU chips. The chips, which the company also makes available to other organizations through its cloud platform, are specifically optimized for artificial intelligence workloads. Google’s newest Cloud TPU can provide up to 275 teraflops of performance, which is equivalent to 275 trillion computing operations per second. 

Image: Google