Google Search's Next Phase: Context is King (theverge.com) 30
At its Search On event today, Google introduced several new features that, taken together, are its strongest attempts yet to get people to do more than type a few words into a search box. From a report: By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions. The end result, the company hopes, will be a richer and deeper search experience. Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan oversees search alongside Assistant, ads, and other products. He likes to say -- and repeated in an interview this past Sunday -- that "search is not a solved problem." That may be true, but the problems he and his team are trying to solve now have less to do with wrangling the web and more to do with adding context to what they find there.
For its part, Google is going to begin flexing its ability to recognize constellations of related topics using machine learning and present them to you in an organized way. A coming redesign to Google search will begin showing "Things to know" boxes that send you off to different subtopics. When there's a section of a video that's relevant to the general topic -- even when the video as a whole is not -- it will send you there. Shopping results will begin to show inventory available in nearby stores, and even clothing in different styles associated with your search. For your part, Google is offering new ways to search that go beyond the text box. It's making an aggressive push to get its image recognition software Google Lens into more places. It will be built into the Google app on iOS and also the Chrome web browser on desktops. And with MUM, Google is hoping to get users to do more than just identify flowers or landmarks, but instead use Lens directly to ask questions and shop.
For its part, Google is going to begin flexing its ability to recognize constellations of related topics using machine learning and present them to you in an organized way. A coming redesign to Google search will begin showing "Things to know" boxes that send you off to different subtopics. When there's a section of a video that's relevant to the general topic -- even when the video as a whole is not -- it will send you there. Shopping results will begin to show inventory available in nearby stores, and even clothing in different styles associated with your search. For your part, Google is offering new ways to search that go beyond the text box. It's making an aggressive push to get its image recognition software Google Lens into more places. It will be built into the Google app on iOS and also the Chrome web browser on desktops. And with MUM, Google is hoping to get users to do more than just identify flowers or landmarks, but instead use Lens directly to ask questions and shop.
What context are Ads? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What context are Ads? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are able to construct a coherent search request (probably using booleans) that zeros in on what you want. That puts you in a minority; you are not Google's target audience.
In Google's view, spam in results isn't a problem, it is a feature.
Kinda refreshing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I feel like it's been years since google has done anything with its actual search engine.
This could be their big chance to completely ruin it then!
Re: (Score:3)
Well the W3C has been trying for a long time making the internet into a semantic web. [w3.org] All kinds of search would be empowered.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm a beta tester... (Score:2)
i just tried it. I searched for :"My political party is being de-platformed from the internets!" ...and it returned: "baseless insurrection."
Hey. it works!!!
I wish more sites used dates (Score:2)
Sometimes when I'm searching for something, there's a pretty close match.
Unfortunately the match is for a version from over 10 years ago and has nothing to do with a solution for a problem from this week.
Re: (Score:3)
"Context" (Score:2, Insightful)
We think primary sources are a dangerous form of context, so here are a bunch of approved goodthink articles that spin this the way we like.
Information silos (Score:2)
Sounds like a recipe for more exclusive information silos.
Buzzword Press Release (Score:3)
I missed a few, like "synergy" and "blockchain". This is about nothing but shoving more ads in your face, which is Google's prime directive.
How about precision and persistent date ranges? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's harder to exclude what you don't want (quotes don't work very well at all) and returns should be rankable by date until otherwise selected.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The "Verbatim" option seems to (partially) recover the quotes to a semi-state of working; it can fix some of your queries (though not all).
it would suffice... (Score:5, Insightful)
If they'd offer full boolean operations again.
Removing brackets destroyed the last remains and made a large amount of queries simply impossible.
x OR b c
is ambiguous about whether
x OR (b AND c)
is meant, or if
(x OR b) AND c
is meant.
Using actual "|" and "&" or at least "||" and "&&" like any other boolean syntax parser in the world would be a sane plus.
And effectively ignoring quotation marks is very annoying too. Especially since quotation marks are not compatible with wildcards anyway, if those wildcards still exist and aren't just a hack.
I don't even freaking expect to be able to search for phrases where punctuation is important, let alone mathematical symbols, (if I could type them, lol) The entire point of me searching for them is that I do not know what their TeX name or generally their name i!
Google nowadays is a prime example of breeding the dumbest common denominator by ignoring the complaints bias caused by the Dunning-Kruger effect. (As in: Dumber people being lazy and demanding everything to cater to their wishes (that are bad even for their interests) louder and more confidently, instead of turning on their brains.)
Re: (Score:2)
They need a separate "expert mode". The reason all the boolean stuff got ripped out is that people often entered things like brackets without intending for them to have any special meaning. So the majority of users were getting unexpected results.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, every search I know has an "advanced search".
I guess Google also scrapped the more complex parsers that enabled these features.
An alternative search engine could really have an opportunity to fill that gap. You just have to market it right.
Boolean isn't hard. Even gradma does it every day.
The user interface just usually isn't very close to how she naturally thinks and acts.
But knowing grandma, her method isn't less powerful. She just goes coarse first, and then adds on details and specifications late.
Next phase? (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't need a next phase. They need to return to the previous phase, or maybe the phase before that. The search results have become horribly adulterated and useless for Google, and especially for YouTube.
Seriously, all the top results seem like things they want me to see vs. actual results for my query. And I absolutely refuse to believe that on YouTube, which has like 1 million of minutes of content uploaded every minute, a query for "" only has mainstream results. I guarantee that for every topic there are 10 creators uploading thoughtful content with only a few hundred views, and that's what I used to see, and what I want to see again.
Re: (Score:2)
It looks like your comment got mangled so I can't tell what you are searching for, but if you want to use certain date ranges you can use the before: and after: search modifiers.
If you want to search YouTube it's best to actually go to YouTube. They do have a problem with the discoverability of smaller channels. One of the best ways is to find one channel you like and then go to the "channels" tab on their page, which shows the other channels they are subscribed to and recommend.
I hate "better" search results (Score:4, Insightful)
The more google knows what I want to search for the less I can actually search for obscure things. Gone are the days when I used to be able to search the whole internet for a text phrase. In about 5% of my searches I'm looking for something very specific and google can't find it or it comes up with the wrong results because it thinks I'm wanting to find something contextual, but I really just want to search the whole web and there are no buttons to change this. Another problem is advanced searching is gone out the window in many cases, I much less of a fan of search now than I was years ago.
Training google (Score:3)
I already can't find anything I want anymore with google! All I can find with it these days is an endless amount of porn.
Endless porn (Score:2)
> I already can't find anything I want anymore with google! All I can find with it these days is an endless amount of porn.
Yeah, I have the same problem. Maybe Google just knows what we really want...
Inventory data is a killer app (Score:1)
"Shopping results will begin to show inventory available in nearby stores". I don't know if they're doing partnership deals to link to inventory management systems, but this is a killer app if they can make it work.
For a lot of purchase queries, people are looking to buy something RIGHT NOW, and want to know the nearest place to get it. Or they want to see it in the flesh before buying it. This could even eat into Amazon's market share.
So Google wants us to train its context AI (Score:2)
50 results (Score:2)
I'm still able to find what I want with Google, but only because I switched to 50 results per page as my default search mode. Once you ignore the top 25 results, you find a lot of the stuff that used to come up from the old Google. It helps to have a pair of 23" monitors in portrait mode, alongside my YouTube and Google maps monitor in landscape mode.
No question that Google has been on the down slope for the last five years compared to what it used to be. What will it take after the next "upgrade"? 100 res