Google Shows Off Its Search Know-How

Last week, Amit Singhal explained that Google’s search results are manually edited on an infrequent basis.  Today, the Google Fellow explored some of the technological achievements that allow for manual interventions to remain so rare.

Some of the features don’t extend much beyond spell-checking suggestions.  These, frankly, fail to impress.  Other things – like recognizing that "soccer" means different things in different countries, or that "dr" can be a person’s title or part of a street’s name – are only a small step up.

 Amit Singhal

Then there’s the fascinating stuff.  On the Official Google Blog, Singhal wrote, "For [Ramstein ab], we automatically look for Ramstein Air Base; for the query [b&b ab] we search for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta, Canada."  A lot of humans would miss those connections, and the Google Fellow continued, "We have developed this level of query understanding for almost one hundred different languages, which is what I am truly proud of."

Singhal’s pride also showed when he mentioned Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR).  We first saw the concept in beta over a year ago, but Singhal summed it up as "give me what I want in any language," adding, "A user looking for Tony Blair’s biography in Russia who types the query in Russian [???? ???? ?????????] is prompted at the bottom of our results to search the English web."  Query and result translations are provided.

Understanding user intent looks to remain a real focus in Google’s future, although unfortunately, Singhal’s in-depth discussion didn’t extend to any upcoming features.