As Google closes in on their 20th anniversary, their journey to making information more accessible and useful for people everywhere is only beginning. From the early days, there have been revolutionary changes in the way users searched for information on the web. With a series of new features and updates, Google is paving the way for an improved and more intuitive search experience.
From looking for recipes to studying for an exam to finding information on where to vote, Google focuses on serving the most relevant, highest quality information as quickly as possible.
Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques, Google today helps users locate information in more ways than one. Whether it’s predicting areas that might be affected in a flood, to helping you identify the best job opportunities for you, AI has dramatically improved the ability to make information more accessible and useful.
With the incredible growth in Search queries over the years, Google today index hundreds of billions of pages, offering Search in more than 150 languages and over 190 countries. Interestingly, 15 percent of those queries are fresh queries, never seen before. Not just the increase in the number of queries, the company also noted the fundamental shifts in Search.
Witnessing the transition from answers to journeys, Google is bringing new features to Search that help users with ongoing information needs. For example, you might be planning a trip, and searching for information about a destination over the course of a month. Now, a new activity card will help you pick up from where you left off in your Search journey, helping you retrace your steps when you might not remember which sites had that useful information you’d found earlier.
Making exploring your interests easier than ever and providing a queryless way to get to information, Google announced Discover, incorporating a fresh name and design to the popular Google Search feed. The new feature will enhance the existing feed experience with newer categories offering users information they are interested in, even without a query. With a growing preference for a more visual way of finding information, Google is also working towards bringing more visual content to Search, by redesigning Google Images to help users find information more easily.
To help Search serve users better today than it did yesterday, and even better tomorrow, Google rigorously tests every change it makes to Search. Last year alone, Google ran more than 200,000 experiments that resulted in 2,400+ changes to search. Every change to Search is evaluated by experimentation and by rater guidelines publicly available for anyone to view.
Taking a major leap forward from understanding words to understanding concepts, Google today makes use of a technique called neural matching. Neural embeddings, an approach developed in the field of neural networks, allow the search engine to transform words to fuzzier representations of the underlying concepts, and then match the concepts in the query with the concepts in the document.
Providing greater access to information is fundamental to what Google does, and there are always more ways to help people access the information they need. That’s why the work here is never done.
