Facebook's Graph Search now includes post and status updates. To stay on top, Google needs to master latent search. Understanding the web to find short answers and “something different” One year ago today we announced Google Squared in Labs, an early attempt to find and extract structured data from across the web, such as a detailed table of [dog breeds] or [broadway shows]. Since then, our team in New York has steadily worked to improve quality and add new features, such as the ability to sort your data and export it to a file.
In the past week, we’ve introduced two features that bring parts of Squared’s technology directly to regular search results. The first provides better answers to fact-finding queries like [independence day of india], and the second is “something different”, a special kind of search refinement in our new left-hand panel. Better answers, with sourcesOften people search to find basic facts, such as [catherine zeta-jones date of birth]. If you click on the new “show sources” link, a box will slide down with websites that corroborate your answer. At a pub quiz night and need help on the round about India? Google Knowledge Graph understands what you're searching for. Deeper understanding with Metaweb. More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event.
Today we are hosting our second Searchology event, to update our users, partners, and customers on the progress we have made in search and tell them about new features. Our first Searchology was two years ago, when we were excited to launch Universal Search, a feature that blended results of different types (web pages, images, videos, books, etc.) on the results page. Since then Universal Search has grown quite a bit, adding new types of results, expanding to new countries, and triggering on ten times as many queries as it did when we launched it. But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems.
To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it. Check out a video tour here: