The evolution of search in six minutes

This summer we posted a video that takes a peek under the hood of search, sharing the methodology behind search ranking and evaluation. Through this methodology, we make roughly 500 improvements to search in a typical year. As we often discuss, that’s a lot of change, and it can be hard to make sense of it all.

Following up on our last video, we wanted to share with you a short history of the evolution of search, highlighting some of the most important milestones from the past decade—and a taste of what’s coming next.

Our goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek. That means you don’t generally need to know about the latest search feature in order to take advantage of it— simply type into the box as usual and find the answers you’re looking for.

However, for those of you looking to deepen your understanding of how search has evolved, the video highlights some important trends:

• Universal Results: With Universal Search—which returns results like images, videos, and news, in addition to webpages—we’re helping you find all different kinds of information in the same place. We’ve continued to make search more comprehensive, enabling you to find products, places, patents, books, maps and more.
• Quick Answers: Today on Google you’ll find more than just a list of links to websites. You’ll find Quick Answers at the top of the page for a wide variety of topics, including flight times, sports scores, weather and dozens more. As our technology gets better, we’re beginning to answer harder questions for you, right on the search results page.
• The Future of Search: We’ve also been focused on developing faster ways to search and save time, whether we’re shaving seconds off searches with Google Instant or helping you search from your phone with Voice Search. Searching should be as easy as thinking, and the future looks bright!

As part of making the video we also created a timeline of search features. It’s not the first timeline we’ve done, but I think this one does a nice job of categorizing the different kinds of Universal Results and Quick Answers we’ve added over the years:

The timeline depicts the approximate dates when we launched particular search feature enhancements. You can also download a larger image by following this link.

It’s been exciting to be part of the evolution of search over the past decade, and we’re thrilled about what’s in store next. If the past is any indication, we don’t know what search will look like in 2020, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it looks nothing like it does today.

Posted by Ben Gomes, Google Fellow

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The “Pride of Australia” and his search story

In February 2011, Queensland, Australia was hit by Cyclone Yasi whose resulting floods devastated many towns and submerged roads and homes. With streets and landmarks under water, Queensland helicopter pilot Mark Kempton and his team faced the gloomy prospect of being unable to identify and rescue stranded Aussies. Armed with his mobile phone, Mark turned to Google Maps to navigate the area and locate people in distress. He and his team worked around the clock throughout the crisis and rescued 43 people from rooftops and treetops in the town of Grantham.

At Google, we’re constantly inspired by our users and honored that our products can play a small part in helping them achieve the extraordinary. Yesterday, Mark Kempton was recognised with the 2011 Pride of Australia Award for Heroism. Congratulations, Mark!

Here is Mark’s search story:



Posted by Lucinda Barlow, Head of Marketing, Google Australia and New Zealand

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Some thoughts on personalization

We’ve written before about personalization in search, but I wanted to take the time to lay out our broader philosophy. First, it’s important to understand what personalization is, and what it isn’t. It isn’t, for example, the entire context of the search: the way pages link to one another, the words on documents on the web, the language of the query, etc. Context is so foundational in search today that without it, search results would be almost meaningless.

Personalization is a narrow class of context. It’s the context of you, the searcher, including your interests and your network of contacts. This special kind of context has a subtle, but important, impact on search results. Personalization is understanding who you are to give you the best answers, and is definitely not about making search results look like your reflection in a mirror.

Context in search
Before I delve into what personalization is really all about, it’s important to understand the value of “context” in search. Think about how you communicate with other people in your daily life, even strangers. For example, if you're standing at a bus stop and you ask, “Excuse me, when is the next one?” -- there are certain things you expect in response. You expect a response in English, and you expect information about this particular bus route. You also expect that if you ask a follow-up question like, “How much is the fare?” -- the answer will be about the bus. You can expect all those things because the person you’re talking to knows the context of the conversation.

If a search engine doesn’t understand context, results become very strange very quickly. Imagine the bus stop scenario without any understanding of context:

     You: “Excuse me, when is the next one?”
     Search results: “The next NFL football game will be on 11/20 between the Bills and the Dolphins”
     You: “How much is the fare?”
     Search results: “Taxis in New York City start at $2.50.”

Context is subtle, and it’s not easy for a computer to replicate the kind of contextual understanding humans have in everyday conversation. Yet, despite the challenges, over the past decade context has become a foundational part of search, and it’s hard to imagine search without it:

• Language: What is the language of the search query? The query language is an incredibly basic, yet important signal we rely on to determine the right results to serve. If you type a search in French and we return results entirely in Swahili, you’ll be changing search engines very, very fast.
• Geography: Where was the search conducted? If you’re looking to order a pizza, and we send you off to a pizza parlor on the other side of the country, you’ll be waiting a long time for delivery.
• Search queries: What search queries did you type immediately before this one? If you say to me “I’m looking for a card game,” and I say to you, “which one?” and then you say “Dominion,” and then I say, “The card game or the power company?” … you’d be pretty frustrated. It’s the same with search.

Personalization, a special kind of context
“Personalization” is a special kind of context; it’s the context of you. For example, what are you interested in, who do you care about, and what do you search for regularly? In addition to the contexts mentioned above, we personalize search results in a couple specific ways:

• Past search activity: With Web History personalization, we make search results more relevant to you based on your interests, as revealed through the “context” of past queries and clicks. We look at both “pattern” (which site do you generally visit for a given topic) and “preference” (which topics do you tend to be interested in). For example, if you’re an apple farmer who frequently visits sites about apple varieties and farming techniques, we’ll be more likely to show you results about apples the fruit rather than Apple computers. If you’re signed out, we’ll still customize your search results based on up to 180 days of past search information linked to your browser using an anonymous cookie.
• Social connections: With Social Search, we improve your results by relying on the context of your friends, family, coworkers and other people you may care about across the web. We’ll sometimes improve the ranking of results if they’re more likely to be relevant based on your social connections. We’ll also highlight your connections by showing their names and pictures in the results when they’ve published or commented on content, for example by clicking the +1 button.

Transparency and choice
As helpful as personalization and context are in serving you the best results, we also want to provide you with transparency and meaningful choices about how you use our services. Transparency and choice aren’t just an afterthought, they’re a core aspect of our products.

In many cases, transparency and choice are critical to getting you the right answer. For example, when it comes to language, you need to be able to change your settings in order to even read the search results you find. Similarly, with location, sometimes our best guess is incorrect, so we provide a prominent setting in the left-hand panel to change your location.

In other cases, we understand that some people simply prefer a less personalized experience. That’s why, for example, you can specify a generic location like “United States” as your location. It’s also why you can always see and manage your Web History, pause it, or turn it off entirely. Even if you’re signed out, you can still opt-out of activity-based personalization. When it comes to Social Search, we provide an easy way to manage your connected accounts, as well as a dashboard with a complete list of the people you’ll find highlighted in your search results.

Our philosophy on personalization
Our goal as always is to give you the answers you’re looking for as quickly as possible. The best answers might include some tweaks and tuning based on your interests, and they might include some perspectives from friends and colleagues, but undoubtedly the best answers from across the web will still be highly relevant. We hear from our users again and again that they value the opinions of experts and authorities, and that’s a big part of why they turn to Google.

The science of search is not advanced enough yet to provide a purely personal experience. We aren’t confident enough, for example, to say that you’re interested in the New York Times and not the Wall Street Journal. However, even if our systems improved so much that we could return only a single source, and it would be the source you like the most, we’d still want to provide a variety of sources and opinions. Our users value diverse viewpoints and serendipitous discovery in search results.

We also know from experiments that our best guess about what you’re looking for is sometimes incorrect, so we need to provide you with alternatives. Is the search [smx] looking for the Search Marketing Expo, the Southern Motocross Club, Santa Maria Airport (SMX), the Samsung SMX F50 camcorder, the North Legion SMX snow bike, the Honda SMX, SMX optics, the SMX 22 submarine, SmX Cinema Solutions, or something else entirely? That’s why we have algorithms in place designed specifically to promote variety in the results page. It’s also why we almost always provide you with a list of search results, rather than just one.

It’s clear that personalization will remain an important trend online that will provide benefits to people around the world, and we think it’s important to be thoughtful about our approach to make sure we get it right. We see tremendous potential to make search better by understanding what you care about. The faster we can get you to answers, the more time you’ll have to learn about diverse perspectives and form educated opinions.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

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Preparing for food, family and football this Thanksgiving

There’s a lot to look forward to at Thanksgiving--pumpkin pie, turkey (or turducken for some people), time with the family, football, and giving thanks. But the holiday can also be stressful if you’re the one preparing the big dinner. Even if you’re planning to get away, traveling during the holidays can seem more like a headache than a vacation, especially when 42.5 million Americans are expected to travel this Thanksgiving.

To help reduce some of the stress so you can spend more time enjoying the occasion, here are some search tips to make your life a little easier.

Tackling the turkey: 

• Recipe View. Prepare a Thanksgiving meal for even the pickiest of eaters using Recipe View in the left-hand navigation bar, where you can search for recipes based on an ingredient, cooking time and/or calorie count. You can search for a [stuffing] recipe without sourdough or a [mashed potatoes] recipe that is less than 500 calories and takes less than 30 minutes to prepare. It's also a great way to find new, creative dishes for those leftovers, like [thanksgiving leftovers shepherd's pie] instead of the usual [turkey sandwich]. 

• Convert units of cooking measurements. Now you have your recipes, but you may need to triple or even quadruple the serving size because you have a lot of people coming over. To quickly do the math and convert different units of measurement, you can enter your desired conversion into the search box. For example, you can find out [how many tablespoons are in a cup] and instead of measuring out 16 tablespoons of sugar, you can just measure out one cup of sugar. 

Taking care of your travel needs: 

• Find flights for your holiday travel using Flight Search. Whether you’re looking to book a last minute holiday getaway or planning ahead for New Year's, our Flight Search feature helps you plan your trip quickly and easily. If your travel dates are flexible, Flight Search can even help you decide when to fly to get the lowest price. How does [Hawaii] for New Year’s sound? 
• Track a flight. While waiting for family or friends to arrive, you can quickly see if their flight is on time just by searching the name of the airline and the flight number, such as [united 688] to see that Aunt Mary has landed in Chicago on time. 

Enjoying the rest of the day: 

• Check the score without leaving the table. If you can't watch the big football match-ups on Thanksgiving day but want to know the score, sneak a peek on your mobile phone by searching for [green bay packers] or [san francisco 49ers] to quickly see the score. 
• Entertain the kids. An important detail to enjoying your well-cooked meal is making sure the kids’ table doesn’t erupt into a food fight. Keep the kids entertained by searching for [Thanksgiving coloring pages] on Google Images, printing them out, and leaving them on the table with crayons. Just make sure there are enough crayons for everyone! 

• Movie night. For some people, the perfect way to cap off a filling turkey-and-pumpkin-pie meal is to take the entire family to the movies. Whether you’re catching the new [Twilight Breaking Dawn] flick or [The Muppets] movie, you can easily check theater locations and showtimes near you by typing [movies] into the search box. 

Hope you have a happy, stress-free, delicious Thanksgiving!

Posted by Dan Russell, Über Tech Lead, Search Quality & User Happiness

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The new Google Search app for iPad

(Cross posted on the Google Mobile Blog)

Today, we're very pleased to be launching a significant redesign for the Google Search app for iPad. As you can see in our video, whether you're doing research and comparing results, or exploring beautiful imagery, we have added new features to make the app more interactive, more visual and to help you find what you want more easily.
 


More interactive

You'll notice that searching is faster and more interactive from your first keystroke. As soon as you begin to type, Google Instant starts to display results, so you don't even need to press the search button.Once you pick a web page to visit, you'll see the page load on a new, slide-in pane that will layer over the search results. You can slide the pane to the right to get back to your search results, and even keep scrolling through the results as your web page is loading. This allows you to go back and forth from results to web pages quickly to get the information you are looking for.

View search results on the left and a web page on the right in the slide-in pane

More visual

Viewing image results in the app is now much more vivid. Tap on any image result to use the new image carousel, which lets beautiful images shine. You'll see the image you selected expand, and you can easily swipe through the carousel to see other similar images. 

Swipe through the image carousel

Often you may be looking to find something you have seen before again or are continuing research on a topic. But on a tablet, typing can be a challenge. That is why we have created a visual way to explore your search history. Swipe right to view snapshots of pages you've visited, stacked and organized by search term. You can also manage your search history from this new view.

See your past searches with a new, visual history

With this release, we also brought Instant Previews to the app so you can quickly compare web pages before you choose your result. Tapping on an icon in the top right of the screen brings you into a visual preview of the pages for your search result, easy to scroll through with the swipe of a finger.  


Find easily

Finally, we added a few extra features that we hope will help you find what you want more easily. After you've selected a result, a new tool helps you find exactly what you need within a web page. Tap the magnifying glass on the top right-hand corner to highlight the most relevant section of the page. You can recommend pages you like with the new +1 button, right next to the magnifying glass, and help others find relevant sites more easily as well.

Helpful tools while you search

We've also made it easier to find and use your favorite Google services like Google News, Calendar and more in the new Apps menu. Tap on an icon to quickly read an email in Gmail, or share a post on Google+ within the slide-in pane. When you slide the pane to the right, you’ll be right back to searching.

Easily find more Google services

The app is available worldwide for iPads with iOS 4.0+. Download it in the App Store and start enjoying a faster and more interactive experience now. 

Posted by Daniel Fish, Software Engineer

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Learn more about Flight Search with three quick tips

(Cross-posted on the ITA by Google blog)

With the holiday season closely approaching, you might be looking to book flights to visit friends and family. With our Flight Search feature, you can plan your trip quickly and easily with just a few clicks of the mouse.

In response to interest from you, we’ve shot three short videos to share some of our favorite ways the Flight Search feature can enable you to explore travel options. For example, you may know you want to travel and have a set budget, but you’re not sure where to go. You can also easily see when to fly in order to get the best deal, and you can use a scatterplot to view the entire set of results to more easily compare all flight options at a glance.

Hope these tips help you spend less time worrying about booking your flight and more time preparing for the holidays.

Posted by Marcin Brodziak, Software Engineer, Flight Search

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Search using your terms, verbatim

Behind the simplicity of Google search is a complex set of algorithms that expands and improves the query you’ve typed to find the best results. Automatic spelling correction ([vynal] to “vinyl”) and substituting synonyms (matching [pictures] to “photos”) are just two examples of the improvements we make.

In most cases, Google’s algorithms make things better for our users - but in some rare cases, we don’t find what you were looking for. In the past, we provided users with the “+” operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly.

Since then, we’ve received a lot of requests for a more deliberate way to tell Google to search using your exact terms. We’ve been listening, and starting today you’ll be able to do just that through verbatim search. With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as

• making automatic spelling corrections
• personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
• including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
• finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])
• searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
• making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]

You can access the verbatim search tool under “More search tools” on the left-hand side.

In addition to verbatim search, which will be rolling out to all users over the next few days, we’re also applying similar ideas directly to our algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger. In the meantime, if you want to search for a very specific term, be that [carosel] or the [etymology of sissors], give the verbatim tool a try.

Posted by Corin Anderson, Principal Engineer, Search

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