Google Highlights Search Changes From March

@techcrunch / 6:20 pm PDT • April 3, 2012

Google has rolled out a great number of small changes to the search engine and UI over the last month, and now they have rolled them all into a big blog post for your consecutive enjoyment.

We’ve highlighted a few that seemed more relevant, but there isn’t much here that’s life-changing. All the same, it’s good to stay up on changes like this, just in case you happen to do SEO for a living (scoundrel).

“+” is now treated as a normal character when that seems to be the intent, along with %, $, \, ., @, and #. Its days as an operator are probably over, though, except when you’re using it in an equation.
Changing your password now logs you out from all your Google stuff, including Search.
Better answers and live scores for Tennis, Russian Hockey, and UEFA Champions League games.
Platform-specific results for app search – so if you search for Angry Birds, you’ll get different results on Android, iOS, and so on. Results are also richer, with stars, download buttons, reviews, etc.
The “Freshness update” that brought recent and differently-organized results to News searches has been rolled out more generally, apparently as a result of having acquired the “machine resources” to do so.
Image search has gotten a handful of updates, including relevancy, better ratings for the quality of the source page (fewer trash pages Google-bombing with popular images, presumably), and Safesearch changes.
The +1 button will show in search results in more countries and domains.

The rest of the list can be found at Google’s Inside Search blog.

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