Google has announced that its search app is becoming more sophisticated in its ability to understand and respond to complex questions. The app is beginning to understand the intent of the searcher, including such concepts as placing items in a specific order or complex combinations of concepts. In other words, Google is beginning to understand questions in the same way as humans.
Writing on the econsultancy blog, Ben Davis explored Google voice search and knowledge graph to test the new search. He found that Google did understand the concept of superlatives and could respond to search queries with specific time frames. It was, however, less able to respond to ‘trick’ questions while not holding back on correcting the searcher’s grammar!
In other Google news Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure has predicted that within five years the company will be earning more from its cloud platform than from advertising revenue and that Google will be a cloud company by 2020.
Keeping up with Google
Are you confused by the many changes at Google? Karen Blakeman has written this article for eLucidate (the journal of the CILIP special Interest group UKeiG) outlining the background to, and the implications of, the latest reorganisation of Google into the Alphabet group of companies.
Sources: Google Inside Search blog; TheNextWeb; Mashable.