The latest installment of Search Quality Highlights posted on the official Google Search blog feature over 50 changes implemented in March.

Although we wont be covering all of the changes, some important implementations are the new symbols for indexing and the better scoring of news groupings.

Google Search usually ignored punctuation symbols in queries or just normalized them to match more relevant predictions in their database. With this changes the following math symbols have been incorporated “+”, “-”, “*”, “/”, “^”, “(“, “)”, and “=” which will for example make it easier for users to search for popular equations. Other symbols that where added are “%”, “$”, “”, “.”, “@”, “#”, and “+”. As we can tell, it seems top be a boost for Google+ which uses the "+" symbol for +1 and for Twitter who is know to use "@" or "#".

The way we search for News has also been changed. The changes are made to the way Google is organizing news about the same story into groups. There is a scoring system that determines the ordering of groups for a given query and by improving this scoring system Google is able give a better ranking to a news cluster. Google has refreshed the design of News Universal result which means that more results are providing from the top cluster and by unifying the UI treatment of cluster of different sizes, a larger font is giving to the top article, adding larger images (from licensed sources), and author information. Local results and sources in Google News have also been improved, making the result more locally relevant and with a higher quality of sources.

Some other improvements includes live results for UEFA Champions League and KHL; Tennis search features; Fresher image predictions in all languages and many other

To view the full list of changes please check out the official blog post