Google has officially launched their new search algorithm called "freshness update". This is a major search engine change by Google after their last year's Panda Update, which affected a very number of search results. They have announced in their blog that It is one of the biggest tweaks to Google’s search algorithm, affecting about 35 percent of all searches. 

The new algorithm is a recognition that Google, whose dominance depends on providing the most useful results, is being increasingly challenged by services like Twitter and Facebook, which have trained people to expect constant updates with seconds-old news. This includes things like recent events, hot topics, current reviews and breaking news items.

"Depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old,”  said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who works on search, in a blog post "Giving you fresher, more recent search results " announcing the changes. He also said “This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need.”

“This is the result of them saying we need to find a way to more effectively get fresh content up” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land and an industry expert. “It does help with the issue of people thinking, ‘Wow, if I need to find out about something breaking, I’ll go to Facebook or Twitter for that.’ ”

It's also said that Google's new search engine updates now render JavaScript, which now allows comments in the blog made by Facebook comments be indexed via Google.  It looks like this can be very good to small news sites that update information a few minutes before a search, but only if Google shows the most recent news related to the search term. If Google's algorithm, besides freshness include other ranking factors like pagerank, only big news sites will rank at the top. 

This will make small official sites, which remain static for long years, to post recent news and information about their industry to come in front.  This changes will bring the big challenge to the search engine optimizer.  In my thought, they have to pay high effort to get into the search results timely. For example, in Nepal we have many travel agencies competing to get top rank in  search engine, now they can't only play with meta keywords, meta descriptions and headings. They need to focus on recent travel news update, which needs high effort. So, the fresh content will become even more important from an SEO point of view. Small agencies who are talent on copying other contents and playing with SEO, will get a big challenge from this new algorithm. 

For those small companies and blogger who has been affected by Google's Freshness algorith, you should give more time to update your blog and site on the social media for live scores. You can publish live update widgets from social networking sites to your site which shows the information related to your industry.

It also seems like they are targeting search results from their own social network, Google+, to get fresh updates.

I would like to hear your thought in this one of the biggest tweak in Google's Search.