A recent interview took place recently with a top executive at Google Search, Google is planning on making drastic algorithmic changes in the near future to provide end users better search results. Google are hoping that the new changes will be focused on semantic search technology.
The algorithmic shift is partially motivated by Google’s plans to launch Google Assistant later in the year. Google Assistant, who will compete directly with Apple’s Siri, will provide users with answers to questions and specific information rather than traditional search results. Singhal, a senior Google VP and Google Fellow, recently indicated that semantic search is necessary for a company to be competitive long-term in the mobile space.
“When we can deliver small nuggets of information, that system is far more suited to mobile phones and searching with voice.”
While search engines do a good job of analyzing the words a user types in the search box and matching the query to web pages that contain similar topics. In order to better understand the searcher’s intent, Google is hoping to harness the power of semantic technologies and give better results. Once Google understands the information a user is searching for, they will be able to provide the user that information directly within the search results page.
Singhal, Google Executive at Google Search told Mashable that Google is building a database of information which will hold over 200 million entities. The database, called the Knowledge Graph, is a element to move away from a simple word-based system to true semantic search. However, even with an extensive database of information, it will be extremely difficult to produce an algorithm capable of instantly and dynamically analyzing relationships and similar attributes between hundreds of millions of individual entities.
