11/18/23, 5:15 PM A Guide to Google Search Ranking Systems | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers

A guide to Google Search ranking

systems
Google uses automated ranking systems that look at many factors and signals
(https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/ranking-results/) about hundreds
of billions of web pages and other content in our Search index to present the most relevant,
useful results, all in a fraction of a second.

We regularly improve these systems through rigorous testing and evaluation

(https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/rigorous-testing/) and provide
notice of updates to our ranking systems
(https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history) when those might be
useful to content creators and others.

This page is a guide to understanding some of our more notable ranking systems. It covers
some systems that are part of our core ranking systems, which are the underlying technologies
that produce search results in response to queries. It also covers some systems involved with
specific ranking needs.

You can also visit our How Search Works site (https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/) to
understand how our ranking systems
(https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/ranking-results/), combined with
other processes, work together so that Google Search delivers on our mission to organize the
world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

BERT
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT
(https://blog.google/products/search/how-ai-powers-great-search-results/)) is an AI system Google
uses that allows us to understand how combinations of words express different meanings and
intent.

Crisis information systems

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Google has developed systems to provide helpful and timely information during times of crisis,
whether those involve personal crisis situations, natural disasters, or other wide-spread crisis
situations:

Personal crisis: Our systems work to understand when people are seeking information
about personal crisis situations to display hotlines and content from trusted
organizations for certain queries related to suicide, sexual assault, poison ingestion,
gender-based violence, or drug addiction. Learn more about how personal crisis
information is displayed in Google Search
(https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9988513).

SOS Alerts: During times of natural disasters or wide-spread crisis situations, our SOS
Alerts system works to show updates from local, national, or international authorities.
These updates may include emergency phone numbers and websites, maps, translations
of useful phrases, donation opportunities, and more. Learn more about how SOS Alerts
work (https://support.google.com/sosalerts/) and how they're part of Google's crisis alerts
(https://crisisresponse.google/forecasting-and-alerts/) that help in times of floods, wildfires,
earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters.

Deduplication systems
Searches on Google may find thousands or even millions of matching web pages. Some of
these may be very similar to each other. In such cases, our systems show only the most
relevant results to avoid unhelpful duplication. Learn more about how deduplication works and
how to see omitted results (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9603785) if desired,
when deduplication happens.

Deduplication also happens with featured snippets

(https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9351707). If a web page listing is elevated to
become a featured snippet, we don't repeat the listing later on the first page of results. This
declutters the results and helps people locate relevant information more easily.

Exact match domain system

Our ranking systems consider the words in domain names as one of many factors to
determine if content is relevant to a search. However, our exact match domain system works

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to ensure we don't give too much credit for content hosted under domains designed to exactly
match particular queries. For example, someone might create a domain name containing the
words "best-places-to-eat-lunch" in hopes all those words in the domain name would propel
content high in the rankings. Our system adjusts for this.

Freshness systems
We have various "query deserves freshness" systems designed to show fresher content for
queries where it would be expected. For example, if someone is searching about a movie that's
just been released, they probably want recent reviews rather than older articles from when
production began. For another example, ordinarily a search for "earthquake" might bring back
material about preparation and resources. However, if an earthquake happened recently, then
news articles and fresher content might appear.

Helpful content system

Our helpful content system (/search/updates/helpful-content-update) is designed to better ensure
people see original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results, rather than
content made primarily to gain search engine traffic.

Link analysis systems and PageRank

We have various systems that understand how pages link to each other as a way to determine
what pages are about and which might be most helpful in response to a query. Among these is
PageRank, one of our core ranking systems used when Google first launched. Those curious
can learn more by reading the original PageRank research paper
(http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html) and patent
(https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999). How PageRank works has evolved a lot since
then, and it continues to be part of our core ranking systems.

Local news systems

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We have systems that work to identify and surface local sources of news whenever relevant,
such as through (https://blog.google/products/news/local-news-update-census-mapper/) our "Top
stories" and "Local news" features.

MUM
Multitask Unified Model (MUM
(https://blog.google/products/search/how-ai-powers-great-search-results/)) is an AI system capable of
both understanding and generating language. It's not currently used for general ranking in
Search but rather for some specific applications such as to improve searches for COVID-19
vaccine information
(https://blog.google/products/search/how-mum-improved-google-searches-vaccine-information/) and to
improve featured snippet callouts we display
(https://blog.google/products/search/information-literacy/).

Neural matching
Neural matching (https://blog.google/products/search/how-ai-powers-great-search-results/) is an AI
system that Google uses to understand representations of concepts in queries and pages and
match them to one another.

Original content systems

We have systems to help ensure we are showing original content prominently in search results,
including original reporting (https://blog.google/products/search/original-reporting/), ahead of those
who merely cite it. This includes support of a special canonical markup
(/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls) creators can use to help us better
understand what is the primary page if a page has been duplicated in several places.

Removal-based demotion systems

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Google has policies that allow the removal of certain types of content. If we process a high
volume of such removals involving a particular site, we use that as a signal to improve our
results. In particular:

Legal removals: When we receive a high volume of valid copyright removal requests
(https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7347743) involving a given site, we are
able to use that (https://search.googleblog.com/2012/08/an-update-to-our-search-algorithms.html)
to demote other content from the site in our results. This way, if there is other infringing
content, people are less likely to encounter it versus the original content. We apply similar
demotion signals to complaints involving defamation, counterfeit goods, and court-
ordered removals. In the case of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), we always remove
such content when it is identified and we demote all content from sites with a high
proportion of CSAM content.

Personal information removals: If we process a high volume of personal information

removals involving a site with exploitative removal practices
(https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218), we demote other content from the
site in our results. We also look to see
(https://blog.google/products/search/improving-search-better-protect-people-harassment/) if the
same pattern of behavior is happening with other sites and, if so, apply demotions to
content on those sites. We may apply similar demotion practices for sites that receive a
high volume of doxxing content removals
(https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9673730). Furthermore, we have automatic
protections designed to prevent non-consensual explicit personal images
(https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6302812) from ranking highly in response to
queries involving names.

Passage ranking system

Passage ranking (https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-on/) is an AI system we use to
identify individual sections or "passages" of a web page to better understand how relevant a
page is to a search.

RankBrain

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RankBrain (https://blog.google/products/search/how-ai-powers-great-search-results/) is an AI system

that helps us understand how words are related to concepts. It means we can better return
relevant content even if it doesn't contain all the exact words used in a search, by
understanding the content is related to other words and concepts.

Reliable information systems

Multiple systems work in various ways to show the most reliable information possible, such as
to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content
(https://blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-improvements-search/) and to elevate quality
journalism (https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/elevating-quality-journalism/).
In cases where reliable information might be lacking, our systems automatically display
content advisories (https://blog.google/products/search/information-literacy/) about rapidly-changing
topics or when our systems don't have high confidence in the overall quality of the results
available for the search. These provide tips on how to search in ways that might lead to more
helpful results. Learn more about our approach to delivering high-quality information in Search
(https://blog.google/products/search/how-google-delivers-reliable-information-search/).

Reviews system
The reviews system (/search/updates/reviews-update) aims to better reward high quality reviews,
content that provides insightful analysis and original research, and is written by experts or
enthusiasts who know the topic well.

Site diversity system

Our site diversity system works so that we generally won't show more than two web page
listings from the same site in our top results, so that no single site tends to dominate all the
top results. However, we may still show more than two listings in cases where our systems
determine it's especially relevant to do so for a particular search. Site diversity generally treats
subdomains as part of a root domain. IE: listings from a subdomain
(subdomain.example.com) and the root domain (example.com) will all be considered from the
same single site. However, sometimes subdomains are treated as separate sites for diversity
purposes when deemed relevant to do so.

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Spam detection systems

No one wants their email inbox filled with spam, which is why spam filters are so helpful.
Search faces a similar challenge, because the internet includes huge amounts of spam that, if
not dealt with, would prevent us from showing the most helpful and relevant results. We
employ a range of spam detection systems
(https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/detecting-spam/), including
SpamBrain (/search/blog/2022/04/webspam-report-2021), to deal with content and behaviors that
violate our spam policies (/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies). These systems are constantly
updated (/search/updates/spam-updates) to keep up with the latest ways that the spam threat
evolves.

Retired systems
The systems below are noted for historical purposes. They've either been incorporated into
successor systems or made part of our core ranking systems.

Hummingbird
This was a major improvement to our overall ranking systems made in August 2013. Our
ranking systems have continued to evolve since then, just as they had been evolving before.

Panda system
This was a system designed to better ensure high-quality and original content was appearing
in our search results. Announced in 2011
(https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html) and given the
nickname of the "Panda," it evolved and became part of our core ranking systems in 2015.

Penguin system
This was a system designed to combat link spam. Announced in 2012
(/search/blog/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality) and given the nickname of the "Penguin
Update", it was integrated (/search/blog/2016/09/penguin-is-now-part-of-our-core) into our core
ranking systems in 2016.

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Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License
(https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies
(https://developers.google.com/site-policies). Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2023-11-17 UTC.

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