Google changes the formula of its search engine while attempting to overcome the problems posed by current technology and maintain its dominant market share, according to The Wall Street Journal. In the coming months, Google’s search engine will start to show more than a list of blue links. It will present more details and direct answers to questions.
The changes are among the most important in its history and can affect millions of sites based on Google’s current search system. At the same time, it will widen the range of options that Google has available to display ads. Google will not change the system through keyword search, which determines the importance of sites by the words contained, the number of links from other sites and dozens of other indicators. The company wants to provide more relevant responses by incorporating the technology called “semantic search”, i.e. the process of understanding the meaning of words.
Amit Singhal, a Google executive responsible for the search engine, said recently that the new formula will better match the words searched with a database consisting of hundreds of millions of “entities” – people, places or things – that the company has quietly garnered in the last two years. Semantic search can help by associating words with others, such as name of a company (Google) with those of its founders (Larry Page and Sergey Brin).
Searching on Google will borrow some of “the way people understand words”, said Singh, adding that when we look for something on the internet today “we keep fingers crossed hoping that there is a website that has the answer”.
Some changes will be felt in the coming months, according to sources, but Singhal said that Google is going through a process that will take several years before reaching the “next generation search engine”. After implementing the changes, people that will search for “Lake Tahoe” will find details such as location, altitude, average temperature or salt content. Users who search on these words today will only receive links to the tourist site of the lake, the Wikipedia page and a link to a map.
For more complex questions like “where are the 10 largest lakes in California?”, Google will be answering the question, instead of only giving links to other sites.
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