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.
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