Google has revamped the How Search Works site, which was launched in 2013 by the company, to describes the efforts Google makes in search. New metrics was added by Google that center around the various Google search launches that they made last year, how many tests they tried out, and the various numbers around their diverse set of search experiments.
Google had mentioned the update to this site at the same time they announced Project Owl earlier this week.
The site shares that Google launched over 1,600 new searches changes (1,653 to be exact!) last year, based on 9,800 live traffic experiments, 18,015 side-by-side experiments and 130,336 search quality tests.
Based on the above numbers, you can tell that only a small number of what Google tires actually goes live. Even then, launching over 1,600 new changes in search over a 12 month period is pretty impressive. We don’t know how many of those 1,600 changes are actual user interface changes versus new feature changes versus algorithmic or ranking changes.
About one percent of searchers were part of the 9,800 live traffic experiments and while many of them were covered, there’s probably a lot of those experiments were missed.
The following GIF of the page documents these numbers:
