A top executive at Google has given a recent interview and said that Google are planning huge algorithm changes very soon to try to improve search results for end users. He said that Google want to focus on semantic search technology. They are hopeful this will help solidify Google’s dominance in the market but also feel this will help provide better technology for mobile devices.
This algorithm change is in line with Google’s plan to launch Google Assistant for Android devices later this year. It will be in direct competition with Siri from Apple. It will allow users to ask questions and then provide them with related information instead of just the normal search results. A senior Vice President at Google indicated that for companies to be competitive long term in the mobile market this semantic search is a necessity. He said that searching with voice and delivering pieces of information is far more suited to mobile search.
At the moment search engines analyses words that are typed into the search box by a user and match the query to web pages that contain those topics or words. Google is hoping to use semantic technology to improve results by understanding the intent of a specific user. If Google fully understands the intent of the user then they will be able to provide the correct information within the search results for most of the queries.
The way Google will do this is by building a huge database of information which will be called the Knowledge Graph. It will have over 200 million entities and is different than a word-based system which is needed for semantic search. It will still be difficult to produce an algorithm capable, even with a huge database, of instantly analysing attributes and relationships between millions of entries. This basically means analysing queries in the way sort of way as the human brain. Is this possible for Google?
