With Yahoo and MSN trailing closely behind, Google wanted to show everyone that they have a few more tricks up their sleeves. The austin update supports the Latent Semantic Indexing Theory . This suggests that non-contextual words are filtered, leaving only important keywords behind for processing. Also, there appears to be a significance in ranking based on the similarity of the "themes" of the website and its backlink sites. Google also changed the IP addresses of most of its data centers all over the world in an effort to thwart optimization techniques such as cloaking.
It appears that there is no longer one search algorithm used to create result sets. Google appears to have implemented different logic based on certain keyword search terms. During evaluation, informational sites such as education and government, were highly ranked and appeared more often. This suggests that a variant of the Hilltop expert-based system was used. Furthermore, this Hilltop system is restricted to general keyword search terms. Google appears to address this deficiency by switching their result set mechanism based upon keywords. Another change in the florida update is the dramatic use of Stemming (word variations).
