This week in search 10/16/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week, we made a few improvements to help webmasters better understand how their pages interact with Google search. Here's an overview:

Fetch as Googlebot
As a webmaster, have you ever wondered what Google "sees" when we visit your site? Our understanding of your web page affects which searches your page is returned for and its relevance rank. New this week, we're providing a tool as part of our Webmaster Tools Lab that lets you to see what Googlebot sees in the hope that this will help site owners better understand why we think your pages are relevant, and to what. We think this can help webmasters design pages that are easier for Googlebot to understand, and more importantly, easier for users to understand.

Malware details
You may occasionally see on Google a notice that says "This site may harm your computer." We place this warning in search result snippets when we see signals that a particular web page may be spreading malware. Webmasters occasionally will see this warning on one of their pages that wasn't intended to be malicious. This is because sometimes your site could be distributing malware — and you might not even know it or be able to easily find it. Malware details is designed to help webmasters track down what on their site is triggering this label and clear the problem — thus, making their page (and the web) safer for users.

Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience