Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) made a major change to its powerful search engine in order to reduce the appearance of what it calls "low-quality" websites in search results.
The move comes after months of criticism from a few technology-industry insiders and an acknowledgment by Google last month that it "can and should do better" to beat back sites that game its system to rise up in search results but offer users little value.
In a post on the company's blog Thursday night, Google search engineers Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal said the change to the search algorithm, which helps rank sites based on how relevant they are to the user's query, would lower the rankings for sites that "copy content from other websites" or "sites that area just not very useful" but have found a way to rise up in Google's rankings anyway. About 12% of U.S.-based search queries would be affected, they said.
"It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down," the Google engineers wrote, adding that sites with original content "such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on" will move up.
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