In this year’s keynote at SMX Advanced, Gary Illyes from Google shed light on a number of topics surrounding Google search.
Panda updates: the updates still happen very slowly, and it takes months to roll out each update. It’s not real-time yet, but apparently the update process is continuous.
Penguin updates: no timeline on the next Penguin update will happen. Gary says the team is working on it but not able to give a date. They’ve missed the last bunch of promised dates by a lot already.
RankBrain: previously announced that RankBrain affected about 15% of queries, but now they’re using it on most queries.
Google+ Authorship: it’s dead, even for in-depth articles.
AMP: (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – Google thinks this is going to be big. Gary says webmasters should be getting ready for AMP now.
Separate mobile index: Google is working on this, but for now, mobile pages are ranked based on the desktop pages’ content.
More details in this summary by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land.