Google used to ignore punctuation symbols in queries or searches, but they recently announced that their system now acknowledges heavily used punctuation symbols like %”, “$”, “\”, “.”, “@”, “#”, and “+”.  According to their latest news update, this change is based on their query stream analysis wherein a huge number of users tend to use special characters to find data or information online.  They also added that they are willing to index more special characters in the future depending on the statistics of usage from their millions of users.

The inclusion of popularly used special characters can help a lot in increasing the quality and quantity of relevant results to queries with keywords that include punctuation marks.  This can also mean that the famous Twitter hash tag signal (#) can now be used to track new topics using Google Search.  The “@” sign can also be used to track Twitter profiles through Google Search.

This recent search query improvement, as expected by most experts in the industry, can directly or indirectly affect Google SEO and other related online marketing services involving the use of the popular search engine.

More Google Search Query Updates

Aside from indexing more punctuation marks and special symbols, Google Search has also made other important changes in their overall query characteristics and structure.  They have officially made changes and improvement on their profile page indexing, data freshness query, navigational queries, and image search queries.

The change in profile indexing includes a better and more comprehensive search result list for public profiles from more than 200 social media websites.   The data freshness update which only applies to news-related traffic before is now being implemented on all types of queries.  This means all types of websites (i.e. blogs & static sites) are now subjected to Google’s data freshness update.  Navigational queries include the improvements to results for navigational queries and better handling of queries with both navigational and local intent.  And lastly, the image search queries wherein improvements are made to increase more relevant image search results, and image search relevance.

More Google News Updates

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