Google receives over two trillion entries into their search engine each year. This heavy traffic requires the site to update their algorithm often to ensure users search queries yield the best results. Last week, Google started its first core update of 2020.
Prior to the update last week, Google’s previous update was announced last October. The previous update, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a new search algorithm that uses machine learning and math modeling to produce better answers to complex questions. BERT helps with voice and text search commands sent in Google Assistant.
Google’s updates help marketers and businesses understand changes in rankings, organic web traffic, and SEO. With 90.46% of the world’s search engine market, understanding Google’s Core updates and how they impact results can be vital for businesses.
However, for the average user searching for everyday information, the 2020 Core Update will include new Chrome features that will directly impact the everyday Chrome user’s experience with the browser, and not just business rankings.
Here are a few of the expected features users can expect to see on Chrome.
Copy images directly from Chrome
On pages opened in Chrome, users can skip the share button and copy images to the clipboard.
Closing tabs
The “Suggest to close Tabs” feature will keep track of when a tab was opened and determines how long it should stay opened. When the time passes, the tabs will become ‘stale’. Chrome will send a notification to let the user know to close the tab.
Improved battery performance
According to a Google engineer, the 2020 Core Update optimized Chrome to use less battery power.
Voice replaced by Google Assistant
Chrome’s voice search feature will be replaced by Google Assistant. This feature is set for a September 2020 release, says Google.
Icons in Google Search
The update that rolled out just two days takes a page from the Safari playbook and has added icons to Search to “better guide you through the information available on the web”.
