Google announced some new features today in celebration of its fifteenth birthday. First off, Knowledge Graph has a new comparison feature and new filters.
“We keep expanding features of the Knowledge Graph so it can answer more questions—even those that don’t have a simple answer,” says Google’s Amit Singhal. “Let’s say you want to get your daughter excited about a visit to the Met. You can pull up your phone and say to Google: “Tell me about Impressionist artists.” You’ll see who the artists are, and you can dive in to learn more about each of them and explore their most famous works. If you want to switch to Abstract artists, you can do that really easily with our new filter tool:”
He adds, “Or let’s say you want to compare two things: How much saturated fat is in butter versus olive oil? Now you can simply tell Google: ‘Compare butter with olive oil.’ Our new comparison tool gives you new insights by letting you compose your own answer.”
He says Google will keep adding more data to make this feature available for more types of comparisons.
Google will soon launch an update to the Google Search app for iPad and iPhone that will provide Google Now-based reminder notifications across devices. This follows a similar update last for Android last month.
Google is also launching a new design for mobile search results and ads:
Google spoke about its new features at the famous Google garage today where they reportedly also discussed a new algorithm called Hummingbird and a song exploration feature.
We don’t know much about these yet, but Danny Sullivan reports that Hummingbird affects 90% of searches worldwide, and “helps with complex queries”.
I’m sure we’ll be finding out more about this soon.
Image: Google
