Google reveals search changes

Wednesday 25 March 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Search giant Google has tweaked the way in which it conducts its search and presents its results. The move is being seen by some pundits as an attempt to pre-empt the activities of its competitors, including new kids on the block Kumo.com and WolframAlpha.

Frustratingly for Internet marketing companies like ourselves here at Gosh! Media, Google is constantly adjusting its algorithm in an attempt to enhance the relevance and usefulness of its search engine results. The company has announced two changes that seem minor but may have far-reaching effects. The first improvement brings an expanded list of related searches – the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page – and the second adds longer search result descriptions.

Google is using new technology to improve its search engine's understanding of associated phrases and concepts related to a particular query. The official Google blog explains, "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." The improvements in related searches don't just apply in English, however – they are now available in 37 languages.

The second algorithm modification that Google has announced relates to the information returned underneath search results titles. Google's blog post explains, "When you do a search on Google, each result we give you starts with a dark blue title and is followed by a few lines of text (what we call a 'snippet'), which together give you an idea of what each page is about. To give more context, the snippet shows how the words of your query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold. When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page."

Taken together, these minor changes could go a long way towards making Google's results more relevant, just when new search engines are snapping at its heels and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are accelerating the changes in users' online habits. Many Twitter junkies, for example, are using Twitter Search to find information in real time.

Could Google's modifications have been timed to combat the possible threat from Kumo.com – as speculation mounts that Microsoft may launch it as a replacement for Live Search, using Powerset's semantic search technology – and the new computational knowledge engine, WolframAlpha?

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