Google is marking 20 years of search by making significant changes to its Search product, and talking about the milestones, the upgrades and the changes the service has undergone over the years. Google compares the present, where hundreds and billions of pages are indexed, to 20 years ago, when in 1998 around 25 million pages consisted of the entire World Wide Web.
There is now an increased reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and that is what the new features of search will increasingly rely on to enhance the search experience. In an official statement, Google says, “We see billions of queries every day, and 15 percent of queries are ones we’ve never seen before. Given this scale, the only way to provide Search effectively is through an algorithmic approach. This helps us not just solve all the queries we’ve seen yesterday, but also all the ones we can’t anticipate for tomorrow.” This is interesting, considering the recent allegations against Google by US President Donald Trump that the company was tampering search results to show negative search results.
“Underpinning each of these are our advancements in AI, improving our ability to understand language in ways that weren’t possible when Google first started,” says Ben Gomes, Vice President, Search, News and Assistant, Google. The company has announced updates to the search experience, across products and platforms.
One of the new elements of the mobile search experience is the Activity Cards. This links to the search history for your account, and lets you pick up a previous search or revisit relevant similar searches in the past. “Many searches are related to longer sessions that span multiple days, with people coming back to Search to find the latest updates on a topic or explore the range of content available. For example, you might be planning a trip, and searching for information about a destination over the course of a month. Or perhaps you regularly search for “easy dinner recipes” to help you plan meals for the week,” says Nick Fox, Vice President of Product & Design, Search and Assistant, Google. Then there is the new Collections in Search feature, which helps you keep track of content you’ve visited, such as a website or article or image, and quickly get back to it at some point. The newest update to Collections makes it easier to add content.
Google Feed has seen significant changes over time, to morph into what it has become today. “It’s grown dramatically over the past year: more than 800 million people use the feed each month to stay up to date on their interests,” says Karen Corby, Group Product Manager, Search, Google. Now, the name changes. Feed will become Discover. Along with the new name comes a fresh design too. The first addition that you will notice are the topic headers, which will now describe why you are seeing that particular piece of content, such as perhaps a new movie trailer is the reason why you are seeing content from the Movies category. If it catches your fancy, simply click on it to follow the topic for more. Secondly, the way text and video content will be laid out in Discover has been tweaked, for better sorting and visibility. Google says there will be greater focus on videos too, which was missing from Feed. Using something known as the Topic Layer in the Knowledge Graph, Google will identify the sort of content you need about a particular topic, and show content to build your interest and expertise in that subject.
Then there is the whole matter of making search more visual. Google says that they will make visual content more usable in search. “We’ve been working to include more imagery and videos in Search, whether it’s illustrated weather reports, live sports clips, or our visual recipe experience. We've been able to do this in part thanks to advancements in computer vision, which help us extract concepts from images. We model hundreds of millions of fine-grained concepts for every image and video that we have in our index,” says Cathy Edwards
Director of Engineering, Google Images. Over the last year, Google has overhauled the Google Images algorithm to rank results based on image quality and content on the page hosting the image. One of the new tweaks Google is rolling out this week is the addition of more context around images in search results, including captions that show the title of the webpage where each image is published. The search results will also implement featured videos more prominently. Then there is the AMP, which helps publishers experiment with formats for the web and mobile. Google says that they will use AI to create AMP stories around the web, and then show this content in Search results.
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