This day in search marketing history: February 27

Google Panda Update 3.3 and Venice

In 2012, Google confirmed the Panda Update 3.3 as well as a noteworthy change to local search rankings.

Panda 3.3 was a refresh of the Panda system, meaning none of the signals Panda looked at were new or had changed.

While Google Panda got the headlines at the time, there was some other noteworthy news about improvements to local search results, which Google referred to as “Venice”:

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal. 

And also this:

Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

This turned out to be a significant local search update.

Google’s algorithm would essentially localize a user’s search results on broad queries that had local intent. This was entirely different from pre-Venice. Put more simply:

Where in the past a search such as ‘seo’ or ‘jacket’ would have simply returned Google’s non-local result set, now Google will include results specific to your location (whether you have actively set your location or not: Google will locate you based on your IP address).

Chris Liversidge,

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Also on this day

2022: The new map let you zoom, pan, hover and click to see more details on the map.

2020: You could test your pages in real time to see how Google displayed your how-to pages on smart displays.

2020: The move was intended to expand the reach of Yotpo-managed reviews content for retailers.

2019: This consolidated your http, https, www, non-www, m-dot, etc into a single property to get an aggregate view of your site’s performance and errors/warnings in a single property.

2019: Diet supplements company was buying fake reviews from a vendor Amazon itself had previously sued in 2016.

2019: Pointy offered a way to gain more SEO visibility and compete with Amazon.

2018: Google couldn’t be held liable before being notified of a ‘clearly recognizable violation’ of individual rights.

2018: Google report dug into three years’ worth of data on removal requests and exposed the delisting criteria.

2017: Google was testing a new format for their local search results on mobile when bringing up the Google Maps local finder. 

2017: Google was rolling out the Google Assistant to more devices.

2017: Searching for nearby GPs and hospitals on Bing UK would surface information pulled from the country’s publicly-funded national healthcare system.

2015: Changes included some subtle but welcome usability updates and the ability to edit the text of keywords that already had been synced.

2015: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

2014: Without promising a fix, the tool asked people to share their original content URL, the URL of the content taken from them and the search results that triggered the outranking.

2014: Smart Annotations automatically pulled information from an advertiser’s landing page in an additional line of text in their ads.

2014: A user took advantage of Map Maker to create fake FBI and Secret Service office listings using his own phone number, and even managed to intercept calls to both agencies.

2014: Boost aimed to help marketers scale the taxing process of creating, testing and reporting on search and social ad creative.

2013: The idea was that if you do a search, you’ll see matching information from your calendar showing within Google’s search results, when it was relevant.

2013: Google got the liability treatment of a “publisher” without the corresponding freedom of expression protections accorded to newspapers.

2012: Mobile search usage had nearly 100 percent penetration among smartphone owners, most of whom searched at least once a week. 

2012: Despite moving away from the large black navigation menu on the web, it seemed Google was testing that exact same version on mobile.

2012: Overall, neither really got the winners right.

2010: Microsoft essentially told Google “get over it.”

2009: Google said it would be conducting “visual experiments early next month” that would start with the link: queries and focus on “blogroll detectors” in the matching algorithm. 

2009: A starting list of who’s out there from the search engine world.

2009: Would the introduction of paid ads on Google News lead to legal issues for Google? 

2009: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

2008: The major search engines announced that site owners could store their XML Sitemap files in any location – even on a different domain than the one referenced in the Sitemap. 

2008: The EFF wanted to know what was said between Google and Jane Horvath, a former US Justice Department privacy lawyer who now worked for Google.

2008: “If we didn’t succeed at the PC, they wouldn’t have a business,” said Craig Mundie.

2008: It attempted to knit all of Yahoo’s recent acquisitions and ad network properties together.

2007: The AdWords Editor program was updated with extra features.

2007: A complainer wanted to use search ads to air his gripes. 

2007: How, when and where Google, Microsoft Live Search, Ask.com and Yahoo showed crawl dates for pages.

2007: A reprise of the “it’s early days” and search is just past its “first generation” comments we’ve heard from Microsoft execs many time before

2007: “We noted your suboptimal experience with our Google pen and are thus pleased to send you — at no charge — a replacement set.”

2007: Flickr was in many ways the company that helped define “Web 2.0” and was its poster child for quite some time.

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These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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