Google Search updated its language matching systems

Google has released another Google Search update around its language matching systems. This update was released two weeks ago, but Google only announced it earlier this morning.

What Google said. Google wrote, “Over the past few months, we’ve also released a series of updates to improve our language matching systems, including the latest update about two weeks ago. Collectively, these should better match results to the language someone searches in, while still allowing for the flexibility multilingual searchers need to access results in multiple languages.”

What changed. Over the past year or so, there have been many complaints where Google was getting the preferred language of the searcher wrong. This resulted in searchers not seeing the content they wanted in Google Search for sites in the language they wanted.

This update should improve how Google matches the language of the searcher to show more relevant web pages in its search results.

Google added, “We will also keep improving how our automated systems determine the language of results to show, so that we continue to list the most helpful information we can to people in the languages they prefer.”

When this was released. Google released this update two weeks ago but only announced it today.

What this impacts. Google said this impacts all languages worldwide.

Why we care. If you have a non-English web site this may have impacted your visibility in Google Search. This update may now lead to your site showing more or less frequently for specific queries in Google Search. Again, this was about improving the search results to match the language of the searchers query better.