Next time you pull up Google.com, you’ll find something a little different. On Tuesday, the search giant rolled out two improvements to Google search.
First, Google integrated an expanded list of related searches that its search technology thinks will be useful. Second, Google is offering longer search-result descriptions. The new features aim to help guide users more effectively to the information they are searching for.
“We’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search-results page),” Ori Allon, technical lead of Google’s search quality team, and Ken Wilder, Google’s snippets team engineer, wrote in the company blog.
Searching Concepts
If you search for “principles of physics,” Google’s algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang,” and “quantum mechanics” are related terms that could help you find what you need. Users can see new related searches in 37 languages.
“We are now able to target more queries, more languages, and make our suggestions more relevant to what you actually need to know,” Allon and Wilder said. “Additionally, we’re now offering refinements for longer queries — something that’s usually a challenging task.”
Google is leveraging technology it attained when it acquired the Orion search algorithm in 2006. That technology scans pages to find related pages or documents and presents them as search refinements in links, mostly at the bottom of the page, explained Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. He expects the refinements to gain greater prominence over time, appearing more often at the top of the results.
“This technology seems to be an advance over what’s going on currently in terms of understanding content or context so that the algorithm…