TECHNOLOGY: INTERNET GIANT Google this week revealed a host of new features of its online search which add a limited amount of intelligence to results rather than simply the standard list of text-based answers.
At its Mountain View headquarters in California, engineers showed enhanced features at an event called Google Searchology.
Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of search engineering, showed how simply putting a flight number into the search engine yields a link to real-time information on the flight’s progress; or how searching for “plumber” will present results relevant to the area you are searching from.
According to Mr Manber, the company has now cleared many of the practical hurdles that dogged search in its early days, such as how to store and access mind-bending volumes of digital information reliably.
“We’re now in a position where these problems are much easier for us, so we can concentrate on starting to understand,” Mr Manber said during the event.
With the new features, Google will pay closer attention to the way that users would like to view their information, offering more control over the type and flavour of search results.
There’s even a visual search option called Wonder Wheel that generates a kind of visual concept map, pointing to similar topics.
The Wonder Wheel and other search power tools can be found by clicking on the link that says “Show options” after executing a Google search.
With Google Squared, a service launching later this month, users can order up an instant spreadsheet on any topic – composed of neatly tabulated information Google plucks from across the web at light speed.
If you try a search for “small dogs”, for instance, Squared will pop out a grid organised by breed, including photos, descriptions and statistical data on each type of pooch.
“It’s a very, very hard computer science problem to try to take the unstructured web and build it into this type of structured information,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products.
Attempting to impress its audience with a final search-related tool, Google showed off a new mobile phone application called Sky Map.
Using a smartphone’s global positioning system capability, as well as its compass and accelerometer, Sky Map can draw a real-time map of the stars so accurate that it knows exactly where users are standing – and even which direction they are facing.
John Taylor, a Google engineer who worked on the app, demonstrated by attempting to locate Ms Mayer’s star sign (Gemini). He rotated the phone gingerly until a red target circle on the screen showed it had locked on to the distant constellation.
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