Google on Tuesday announced it has broadly released changes that it expects will produce better results for complicated searches.
The technology works by analyzing the content of Web pages that appear related to the query and determining from those pages the "entities" such as people, places, or concepts that are related to the query. Sometimes it would then offer suggested new searches in a "search refinements" section that appears at the bottom or top of the list of results, said Ori Allon, technical lead for the company's search quality team, in an interview. The processing occurs during the fraction of a second Google takes to return search results.
"We try to understand what's the meaning of the query, the context of the query," Allon said. "We can do a better job of generating refinements that let users hopefully get to results they want."
Google offered search refinements in the past, but mostly only in English. Now they'll show with "most searches," and in all 37 languages Google supports, Allon said. The technology helps more with long, complicated queries, but it works on simple ones, too, he added.
One example: a search for "revolutionary technological developments in history" shows a variety of other searches at the bottom of the page. Among them are searches relating to the American Revolution and the agricultural revolution, neither of which appear in the top 10 results.
A search for 'revolutionary technological developments in history' shows these other searches at the bottom of the search results.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)In addition, for longer queries, Google is showing more information in the "snippets" of text included with each search result so people can better judge each site.
"We feel that with longer snippets, you get a better understanding of what the site is about and whether you should click through," Allon said. "We noticed with longer snippets, people (less often) click and come back because they didn't find what they want."
Allon and Ken Wilder, an engineer with Google's snippets team, described the changes in a blog post Tuesday.
The changes show the difficulties that contenders in the search arena face in trying to get an edge over Google. Wolfram Research, for example, plans to reveal a search technology called Wolfram Alpha in May that's specifically designed to handle longer questions people might ask a search engine, and some of Google's new changes appear to help the company with that sort of query.
Google has found in its testing that the search refinements help in the real world.
"We noticed that people who don't find what they want in top 10 results tend to use refinements," Allon said, scrolling up and down and looking beyond the first page of results. With the better search refinements, "We witnessed a significant increase of people who find what they want."
Though Google's search refinements appear in a separate section today, Allon didn't rule out blending the information directly into the search results themselves. "We are working on future development of this, but there's nothing we can announce today," he said. "This is not the only improvement we have."
Roku's November 13 note to customers asking them for help determining the cause of a dramatic decline in video quality.
(Credit: Roku)The Netflix Player by Roku, which enables owners to watch streaming Web video on their TV sets, has received plenty of applause from pundits and owners since debuting last May. But the box now faces its first major challenge.
Customers from around the country have been "experiencing inexplicable loss of video-streaming quality," for at least three weeks according to Roku's engineers, who have posted comments at the company's Web forums. Device owners have posted complaints to the same forums about receiving less than half of the video quality they've had in the past. One user told CNET that the video stream is now "unwatchable."
Tim Twerdahl, vice president of consumer products at Roku, told CNET News on Monday that the company is still unsure about what exactly triggered the problem, but he said indications are it originated at Netflix. Twerdahl added that the problem likely affects Netflix's other boxes as well as Roku's player.
"All we know is Roku didn't make any changes," Twerdahl said. "This is not a box problem. We know from some reports that this seems to be correlated with a change in Netflix's content distribution network (CDN), and Netflix is trying to figure out what the issue is."
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Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)Attention advertisers: a promised change to Google's AdWords quality-judging method will take effect in coming days.
The change adjusts Google's calculation of advertiser's quality score--a key factor in determining how much the advertiser must bid to ensure ads are placed next to search results. With the new system, quality is calculated at the time a Google user performs a search, though historical data such as an advertiser's click-through rate still factor into the equation, Google's Trevor Claiborne said on its AdWords blog on Monday.
Given the size of the industry that's grown up around Google's search-ad system, any changes can cause indigestion in the search-engine marketing (SEM) business. Google tried to encourage people to look at the big picture, though: "These improvements are part of a continuing effort to deliver relevant ads to our users, and also to provide you with more control over your bidding and more insight into the quality of your ads and keywords," the company said.
Another change replaces the "minimum bid" price with an estimate for how much a particular advertiser would have to bid for ads to show on the first search page.
"Queries with a high level of advertiser competition may have significantly higher first page bid estimates, because you'll likely need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than your competition and show on the first page," Google said. "Remember that you can bid less than your first page bid estimate and still show on subsequent pages--as long as your keyword is relevant to our users."
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