In an official blogpost today, Google announced that it was sprucing up its search engine in some new and disturbing ways. The blogspot read:
Larry Page once described the perfect search engine as
understanding exactly what you mean and giving you back exactly what you
want. It’s 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.
So what exactly has changed in Google search in the year 2012? Here’s a quick look:
Email in Google search:
Well for starters should you
choose to sign up, results from your Gmail will appear on the right
side of your search. So say you type the word mountain bike, in Google
search, then your email conversations from the past with the word
mountain bike will show up in the results too.
This change has already sparked off privacy concerns with users not
too happy at the way Google is searching personal email to blend with
regular search. There are also concerns around someone else using your
computer, and search yielding results from your personal email. Yes,
open aanother session, you might say, but everyone doesn’t do that. For
now this feature isn’t compulsory, but Google does intend to incorporate
it into search at some point.
Gmail in Google search. Screengrab.
This follows two other significant changes such as the introduction of Knowledge Graph and Google Plus into search results.
The Knowledge Graph was launched in May in the US.
This feature draws from a Google-built database of more than 500 million
people, places and commonly requested things to provide a summary of
vital information along the main search results.
According to reports, the search engine spent the past two years
crawling Wikipedia, the CIA Factbook and other sources to expand a
database of 12 million items that it picked up as part of its 2010
acquisition of Metaweb.
The Knowledge Graph was until recently available only in the US but
Google in today’s blogpost said they are rolling it to out every English
speaking country. It’s not yet available in India.
Knowledge Graph, gives users extra information about the term they
search for in the right hand-side. From Wikipedia links to fun-facts,
this is Google’s way of making search more intelligent. But more than
that it is also a testament to the kind of data that Google has managed
to acquire over the years.
Google plus in search:
This is of course a change
from January when Google announced that it would incorporate results
from its social network Google Plus into users’ search results. What
this meant was that if any of your friends had clicked plus one on a
post, then that too would be part of the search results. Other features
included recommending additional people and companies to follow on Plus,
based on search requests.
Google’s idea was that it was making search more social, especially
in line with growing competition with Facebook which has a lot of social
content shared within the site. Google plus is still nowhere near
Facebook in terms of numbers, usage or popularity.
Google has also spruced up its Search App for the iPhone and the iPad
to include Voice search on the lines of Apple’s Voice agent, Siri.
Google’s search engine has evolved vastly from what it was at the
beginning — social network results to specialised graphs, to interactive
doodles — a mere list of links.
Source : Firstpost.com
Comments