Google tweaks search engine results reporting

Google has made enhancements to its main search engine

Google is adding two new features to its main search engine in an attempt to improve the ease of searching.

The first is a new technology designed to enhance the suggested related search information that appears at the bottom of a search page. The new application broadens the scale of related searches to related concepts within the search term.

"For example, if you search for 'principles of physics' our algorithms understand that 'angular momentum', 'special relativity', 'big bang' and 'quantum mechanic' are related terms that could help you find what you need," said Ori Allon, technical lead of Google's Search Quality Team, on the Google Blog.

The new related searches are being rolled out gradually, and are already available in 37 languages.

The second improvement comes in a lengthening of the 'snippet' information that appears below hyperlinks. The snippets will be lengthened with searches for three or more words to give more information, because longer, more complex, search terms often do not include information on all the terms.

"Suppose you were looking for information about Earth's rotation around the Sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the Sun. So you type all of that into Google: 'earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun'," said Ken Wilder, snippets team engineer at Google.

"A normal-length snippet wouldn't be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics."

Google has been retooling and updating its flagship search product for some time, pursuing areas such as universal search and cross-language search.

Earlier this month, the company debuted an updated image search service for mobile handsets.