Ultimately, Google “time” is not a natural phenomenon: it is driven by human choices, reactions, and occasionally errors. Whether the changes are heuristic or machine-driven, they are all driven by the same underlying philosophy and business models.
SGE is a perfect example. We’re still waiting for a full-scale launch, which suggests Google doesn’t entirely like what it sees. It is easy to choose the quality of any given result generated. However, in the big picture, Google must consider the impact on overall quality, ad revenue, speed/latency, and considerable cost of implementing these models.
Even SGE’s very existence was driven by the pressure of OpenAI’s public success and Microsoft’s Bing partnership, accelerating Google’s previously conservative timeline. These decisions go far beyond the algorithm itself and even Google’s technological capabilities. To understand the future, we must understand all these pressures.
We can learn a lot from the last ten years, but ultimately we must be able to adapt. The only guarantee is that as long as people need to find information, people, places and things, both search engines and search marketing will continue to exist.
For a complete list of major algorithm updates up to the 2003 “Boston” update, see our history of Google algorithm updates. For daily data on Google ranking flow and SERP feature trends, visit our SERP tracking project MozCast.