Google search piles on pounds of facts to score fat dollar
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Google has tweaked how its results are displayed in its recently overhauled search engine in a move to keep users on its web pages for longer.
Exactly a year since the company launched Google Squared, which is the Mountain View Chocolate Factory’s attempt at structured data search, Google has rolled out new features to take advantage of it.
Last week Google changed its search results page by pushing more information to a left-side menu, which made it look a bit like Microsoft Bing to us.
Yesterday it began refining search queries even more by plonking specific fact results directly on its page.
So, if you search for David Cameron’s date of birth, or information about who is the president of Ecuador (it’s Rafael Correa Delgado, in case you wondered) Google delivers the facts directly to its page, thereby stopping people from having to click on another link to see the result.
It’s quite a nifty feature for anyone looking for a quick hit of fairly standard informational results from the search engine, especially when using a mobile device, for example.
But then, those businesses that have paid a premium to AdWords to get people searching Google to click on their webpages might not be quite so chuffed with Mountain View's latest ad broker gameplay.
Google said it has also slotted a “something different” section into its left-hand menu, which was developed in Google Squared experimental tech.
“While I’m happy with the progress we’ve made, there’s much more to be accomplished in this area - from searches that have multiple answers, like [us supreme court justices], to searches too complex for us to understand today, like [what major did bill clinton’s daughter study at stanford?],” said Google search tech boss John Provine.
“We’ll continue to look for new ways to apply our deepening understanding of the web to improve your search results. Both new features will be available globally in English (something different is available now, and the improved answers feature should finish rolling out by the end of the week).”
Microsoft's Bing doesn't offer a similar feature yet. And as for the more complex stuff, like the one about Bill Clinton's daughter, even computational knowledge engine egghead Wolfram Alpha currently fails to deliver the correct result. ®
COMMENTS
Caution
Google have to be careful not to be too greedy. Once the quality of the service starts to swing towards making them money and not providing a good user experience then people will look elsewhere.
It happened with Vista, Microsoft lost the home user to add DRM and features for business.
Google doesn't provide information
The problem is their search engine has lost its mind. That is the only reason I can come up with when I type in a search request for particular information that I know is on a page, and it doesn't show up till the third page. Quoting phrases didn't improve things either. At Yahoo it showed up in the middle of the page without quotes, second down with quotes. The first was an article about the data I was searching for on the net. I thought it might have been because I used a Google search box at a site but their own search page gave me the same results. I only did the test because of the results I got on the first search for a known page. I made sure the same arguments were used for both sites in the test.
Heh
Just for kicks I ended up doing the same and now its Wiki first, your posting on the forum second and the article third :)
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