NEW DELHI: In a post on the company's official blog, Amit Singhal, the man responsible for the search engine at Google, announced a bevy of new features that he said would make "search even more intelligent."Beginning the post, Singhal said that when he was kid growing up in India, he had a dream. "It (a perfect search engine) is very much like the computer I dreamt about as a child growing up in India, glued to our black-and-white TV for every episode of Star Trek. I imagined a future where a starship computer would be able to answer any question I might ask, instantly," he wrote. "Today, we're closer to that dream than I ever thought possible during my working life."
On Wednesday night, Google said that its Knowledge Graph, a feature that it rolled out in the US in May, would be available to Google search users across the world if they are using English to input their query. Singhal wrote on his blog that knowledge graph uses a database of more than 500 million real-world people, places and things with 3.5 billion attributes and connections among them.
Instead of giving users search results, with knowledge graph Google hopes to offer answers. "By combining our Knowledge Graph with the collective wisdom of the web, we can even provide more subjective lists like 'best action movies of the 2000s' or 'things to do in Paris'," wrote Singhal.
Google also announced that if users want now, they could search the web and their Gmail at the same time. At the moment, the feature is a sort of experiment and to access it users will have to specially sign up for it. Singhal wrote, "Sometimes the best answer to your question isn't available on the public web—it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email... Starting today, we're opening up a limited trial where you can sign up to get information from your Gmail right from the search box."
At an event in san Francisco, Google revealed that its spiders crawl 20 billion web pages daily and that it serves over 100 billion search queries every month.
In his blog post, Singhal also revealed that soon the company will launch an app similar to Google Now, which is available on Android phones running version 4.1 or Jelly Bean, on Apple's iPhone and iOS. Google Now, if permitted, uses a person's search history and GPS coordinates to give useful nuggets of information even before it is searched. For example, if information is available, Google Now can tell a user when the next train would arrive as soon as he reaches the station, even if he had not searched for it.
With the help of Knowledge Graph, Google Now can also provide answers and talk back to smartphone users. Siri, Apple's intelligent virtual assistant, also has this feature. "These are baby steps, but important ones on our way to building the search engine of the future," wrote Singhal.
Source : Times of India
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