John Mueller in a Google+ hangout this morning said that with future Panda updates, since it is now part of the core algorithm, webmasters "probably wouldn't see those kind of updates happening." Meaning, webmasters might not notice future Panda updates.
Truth is, this is similar to the Panda 4.2 update which went unnoticed by many many webmasters - not all of course.
John said at the 31:10 mark into the video:
As part of the core algorithm, you probably wouldn’t see those kind of updates happening. That’s something that's just kind of rolling, rolling right along, so it's not so much like in the past where you'd see on this date, this actually changed, and we, we updated that. So that's something kind of something as a more rolling algorithm you wouldn’t really see the individual cut dates of specific parts of the data.
So from that, one would thing that since it is rolling along, it seems real time. So the immediate follow up question was, it is real time or not? So John added:
It’s not real time, in the sense that, we don’t crawl URLs and have that data immediately. So it’s something we kind of have to bundle together, understand the data, and have that updated. And we do that on more a rolling basis now so that when one is finished, the next one kind of starts. So it’s real time if you look at a really big scale in that things are happening all the time, but it’s not real time in the sense that every second there is a new value that’s being produced based on new a new data point that we have.
So here again, we see the data is slower to update but the algorithm keeps running. John added:
I think what you would usually see is that this is just kind of a subtle move from one to the other thing, as things kind of roll out. So it’s not that you would even notice this cycle.
Again, all of this seems like how we saw Panda 4.2 roll out...
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Forum discussion at Google+.
