Mountain View, California — Making a dramatic shift in its strategy, global search engine giant Google is prepping a radical overhaul, and has long been working on the “next generation of search” and now it is ready to start rolling it out over the next few months, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal.
Rather than simply presenting a list of blue web links, as well as staying ahead of its arch rival Bing and to keep up with escalating competition and new technology, the web titan is intensely working to keep ahead of the pack by completely revamping its search function to unearth new revenue source, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The recent report indicates that, once the changes are complete, the internet titan will provide ‘more facts and direct answers at the top of the search-results page’ to automatically comprehend meanings of phrases and questions to better fetch the online information being sought in addition to the usual blue hyperlinks to relevant Websites.
Google Doodle honoring origami master Akira Yoshizawa (Credit: Google)
However, the Journal quoted Amit Singhal, Google fellow and online search veteran, for the facts. He mentioned that some of the recommended changes resembles Wolfram Alpha’s concept, a British computational search engine that delivers a definitive set of answers (usually numerical) in place of a page of Web links.
For instance, entering a search query “James Dean” into Wolfram Alpha, and you receive data on the iconic actor’s birth-date and death-date, place of birth, and so on; do the same in Google, and your screen is flooded with a variety of Website links, images, and news items.
“Right now, our understanding is pretty darn limited,” Singhal said of online search Thursday in a message posted at the company’s Google+ online social media network.
“Ask us for the 10 deepest lakes in the US and we will present you with a decent results based on those keywords, but not necessarily because we understand what depth is or what a lake is,” he explained.
To make search more intelligent, Google is harnessing into the virtual brain of a Freebase database of knowledge regarding what things are and how they relate to one another. The proposed update will refine search queries through an enormous database of people and objects, and rely heavily on semantic search, or “the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.”
“Our vision for this knowledge graph is as a tool to aid the creation of more knowledge — an endless cycle of creativity and insight,” Singhal said.
Ever since the rapid rise of Twitter and information updates in real-time, Google has been striving to revive its core search service, to make it as relevant and timely to each user.
In fact, despite having enjoyed a partnership with the microblogging site for two years, which empowered the search engine to index and surface tweets in the body of its search results, though it has failed to negotiate the same deal again. This has left Google without up-to-the-minute news in the body of its search results – beyond its Google News service.
While Google continues to monopolize the traditional search realm, it faces a not-insignificant challenge from Microsoft’s Bing. Besides, the changes will not affect its keyword search system — but will see the company blend this with the semantic search technology. But, it is likely to affect the millions of websites which rely upon Google’s current page-ranking results.
Nevertheless, as search evolves, the tension grows on Google to both stay ahead of its competitors and ferret out new sources of ad revenue. Its upcoming changes could be the search-engine giant’s way of doing both.
However, the changes are supposed to roll out over the next few months, the Journal reports, but the full makeover to “next generation of search” will likely take years to come.