With all the recent updates that Google has released over the last couple of years, you probably think that the tech giant has done everything it can to improve the efficiency of its search engine. Apparently, that wasn’t the case. According to a recent study, Google has significantly increased the number of sites and ISPs it is using to serve search requests from last year by a staggering 600%.
Researchers from the University of Southern California have found that the tech giant beefed up the number of locations serving search requests from less than 200 to more than 1,400 between October 2012 and July of this year. In addition, Google has also increased the number of ISPs it was using from just at least 100 to more than 850 during the same period.
The researchers revealed that the tech giant was “repurposing existing infrastructure to change the physical way that Google processes web searches.” This basically means that Google is using all valuable resources it can find so it can better respond to user requests for search queries. Lead research Matt Calder also said Google was turning the content-hosting infrastructure of client networks like YouTube into a search infrastructure as part of the expansion.
As a business owner or just a simple netizen, meanwhile, you might be wondering what the significance of Google’s continuous expansion is. Well, this is important because it clearly shows that despite the tech giant’s plans and latest moves to make its presence known in other directions, search has remained as its main focus.
Many experts believe that the tech giant still consider its users’ search experience as “high priority,” as evidenced by the fact that the Google just rolled out major updates to its search algorithms just a month ago. For instance, Google released the Hummingbird update to provide users with richer and more conversational search results. It is a huge update and is expected to affect 90% of all global searches. Then there’s Penguin 2.1, which has the ability to “crawl and analyse even deeper-level pages to identify spam activities happening at a deeper page-level.”
According to the researchers, Google’s move to continuously expand and refine its search services seemed to have benefits for users, Internet service providers, and the tech giant itself. Through the updates, web users can have access to a better web browsing experience. The ISPs, on the other hand, are able to lower their operations costs by keeping more traffic local. And as for Google, the tech giant is able to deliver its content to user much quickly.
If you’re a business owner or a webmaster, you should brace yourself for more high-level updates from Google. It seems that the search giant isn’t done yet and it is very likely that this trend will continue in the near future.