Make Google your default search engine Google Search Help

December 9, 2025

How Google Search continues to improve results We build our systems to get you the most helpful results from the most reliable sources we can find. We send visitors to websites big and small, and support site owners with free tools and resources.
The FTC was also continuing to investigate if Google's favoring of their own services in their search results violated antitrust regulations. In 2012, the US Federal Trade Commission fined Google US$22.5 million for violating their agreement not to violate the privacy of users of Apple's Safari web browser. Google's 40,000 searches per second translate to 8 kg CO2 per second or over 252 million kilos of CO2 per year.
The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine's results with information gathered from a variety of sources. The move was interpreted in some quarters as a response to Microsoft's recent release of an upgraded version of its own search service, renamed Bing, as well as the launch of Wolfram Alpha, a new search engine based on "computational knowledge". In October 2016, Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst with Google, announced that the search engine would be making a separate, primary web index dedicated for mobile devices, with a secondary, less up-to-date index for desktop use. Additionally, Google indexes some file types, being able to show users PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, certain Flash multimedia content, and plain text files. Clicking on the magnifying glass beside the search-result links will show a screenshot of the web page and highlight the image's relevant text.

Before 2024, Google also provided desktop users links to cached versions of their search results, formed by the search engine’s latest indexing of the website in question.
Besides the main text-based search-engine function of Google search, it also offers multiple quick, interactive features.
Our algorithms look not only at specific words, but compound queries based on those words, and across all languages.
In 2012, the US Federal Trade Commission fined Google US$22.5 million for violating their agreement not to violate the privacy of users of Apple’s Safari web browser.
The service evolved from Google Video, Google’s discontinued video hosting service that also allowed to search the web for video clips.
We send visitors to websites big and small, and support site owners with free tools and resources.

New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search

Search products

In 2023, drawing on internal Google documents disclosed as part of the United States v. Google LLC (2020) antitrust case, technology reporters claimed that Google Search was "bloated and overmonetized" and that the "semantic matching" of search queries put advertising profits before quality. Google Search Console helps to check for websites that use duplicate or copyright content. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for improving rankings to draw more searchers to their clients' sites. Because Google is the most popular search engine, many webmasters attempt to influence their website's Google rankings. The algorithm computes a recursive score for pages, based on the weighted sum of other pages linking to them.
We show different kinds of content to help you find what you’re looking for – from maps to movie times. Check the facts with these Google features Sign up to try these features in Labs once they're available. Google originally suggested that the interruption was temporary and related to the launch of Google+; they subsequently announced that it was due to the expiry of a commercial arrangement with Twitter to provide access to tweets. The feature was introduced on December 7, 2009, and went offline on July 2, 2011, after the deal with Twitter expired.

Universal search

Users can also activate "SafeSearch", a filtering technology aimed at preventing explicit and pornographic content from appearing in search results. The order of search results returned by Google is based, in part, on a priority rank system called "PageRank". It allows users to search for information on the Web by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search (also known simply as Google or google.com) is a search engine operated by Google. In January 2011, geolocation links of posts were made available alongside results in Real-Time Search. Hashtag search links were also supported, as were "promoted" tweets hosted by Twitter (located persistently on top of the river) and thumbnails of retweeted image or video links.
This feature uses Google's advanced Gemini 2.0 model, which enhances the system's reasoning capabilities and supports multimodal inputs, including text, images, and voice. Scientific American has criticised the system on environmental grounds, as such a search uses 30 times more energy than a conventional one. Two weeks after the rollout of AI Overviews, Google made technical changes and scaled back the feature, pausing its use for some health-related queries and limiting its reliance on social media posts. At the 2023 Google I/O event in May, Google unveiled Search Generative Experience (SGE), an experimental feature in Google Search available through Google Labs which produces AI-generated summaries in response to search prompts. Google Discover, previously known as Google Feed, is a personalized stream of articles, videos, and other news-related content.

“Hummingbird” places greater emphasis on natural language queries, considering context and meaning over individual keywords.
It has also been criticized for condensing information from various sources, making it less likely for people to view full articles and websites.
Originally limited to movie and recipe websites in the United States only, the feature expanded to all countries globally in 2017.
Google also offers a Google Advanced Search page with a web interface to access the advanced features without needing to remember the special operators.
Wired withdrew Megan Gray’s piece after Google complained about alleged inaccuracies, while the author reiterated that «As stated in court, “A goal of Project Mercury was to increase commercial queries”».

Possible misuse of search results

In March 2024, Google announced a significant update to its core search algorithm and spam targeting, which is expected to wipe out 40 percent of all spam results. In February 2015 Google announced a major change to its mobile search algorithm which would favor mobile friendly over other websites. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. A feature similar to Real-Time Search was already available on Microsoft's Bing search engine, which showed results from Twitter and Facebook.
A Google blog post about designing "India-first" products and features explains that it is "tailor-made for the millions of people in India and Indonesia coming online for the first time". The Local Pack and Answer Box were two of the original features of the Google SERP that were primarily showcased in this manner, but this new layout creates a previously unseen level of design consistency for Google results. On December 15, 2016, Google rolled out a new desktop search interface that mimics their modular mobile user interface.

Google Discover

The primary objective of the Google Knowledge Panel is to provide users with immediate, factual answers, reducing the need for extensive navigation across multiple web pages. The content within a Knowledge Panel is derived from various sources, including Wikipedia and other structured databases, ensuring that the information displayed is both accurate and contextually relevant. The information is often used as a spoken answer in Google Assistant and Google Home searches. The information covered by the Knowledge Graph grew significantly after launch, tripling its original size within seven months, and being able to answer "roughly one-third" of the 100 billion monthly searches Google processed in May 2016. Knowledge Graph boxes were added to Google's search engine in May 2012, starting in the United States, with international expansion by the end of the year. Originally limited to movie and recipe websites in the United States only, the feature expanded to all countries globally in 2017.

We will continue to work to improve our approach to removals in Autocomplete, and are listening carefully to feedback from our users. Because of this, we take pistolo casino login an algorithmic approach to removals, and just like our search algorithms, these are imperfect. There are several reasons you may not be seeing search queries for a particular topic. This has led to lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, and the use of euphemisms, such as calling Google Search a famous web search engine. Google has said it will appeal the ruling, though they did propose to loosen search deals with Apple and others requiring them to set Google as the default search engine.

The new architecture provided no visual differences in the user interface, but added significant speed improvements and a new "under-the-hood" indexing infrastructure. In August 2009, Google invited web developers to test a new search architecture, codenamed "Caffeine", and give their feedback. In December 2017, Google began rolling out the change, having already done so for multiple websites. In 2012, Google changed its search indexing tools to demote sites that had been accused of piracy. Despite Google search's immense index, sources generally assume that Google is only indexing less than 5% of the total Internet, with the rest belonging to the deep web, inaccessible through its search tools. In April 2025, the trial to determine which remedies sought by the Department of Justice would be imposed to address Google's illegal monopoly, which could include breaking up the company and preventing it from using its data to secure dominance in the AI sector.needs update

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