Google today announced a number of enhancements to its main search engine, with a strong focus on how the company uses AI to help its users. These include the ability to better answer questions with very specific answers, very broad questions, and a new algorithm to better handle typos in queries. The company also announced updates to Google Lens and other search-related tools.
Most of these are meant to be useful, but some are also just fun. Now you will be able to hum a song and the Google Assistant will try to find the right song for you, for example.
As noted by Google, 1 out of 10 search queries have a misspelling. The company already does a good job of dealing with those through its "meant" feature. Now, the company is rolling out an enhancement to this algorithm that uses a deep neural network with 680 million parameters to better understand the context of the search query.
Another nifty new feature is integration with various data sources, which were previously only available as part of Google's Open Data Commons, in search. Now, if you ask questions about something like "employment in Chicago", Google's Knowledge Graph will fire up and show you graphs with this data right on the search results page.
Another update announced by the company today is its system's ability to index parts of pages to better answer niche questions, such as "how do I determine if my windows have UV glass?" The system can now direct you directly to a paragraph on a DIY forum. In total, this new system will improve about 7% of queries, Google said.
For broader questions, Google is now also using its AI system to better understand the nuances of what a page stands for to better answer these questions.
Nowadays, a lot of content can also be found in videos. Google is now using advanced computer recognition and voice recognition to tag key moments in videos - something you can already find in Search these days, but this new algorithm should make it even easier, especially for videos where i creators haven't already tagged the content.
Other updates include an update to Google Lens that lets you ask the app to read a passage from a photo in a book, regardless of language. Lens can now also understand math formulas and then show you detailed guides and videos to solve it. This not only works for math, but also for chemistry, biology and physics.
As the holiday shopping season is approaching, it is perhaps unsurprising that Google has also rolled out a number of updates to its shopping services. Notably, the company is rolling out a new feature in Chrome and the Google app where you can now long tap on any image and then find related products. And for people with fashion issues, the service will also show you related articles that tend to show up in related images.
If you're shopping for a car, you'll now also be able to get an AR view so you can see what they look like in your driveway.
In Google Maps, you'll also now be able to point to a restaurant or other local business when using AR driving directions to see their opening hours, for example.
Another new feature in Maps is that Google will now also show real-time activity information directly on the map, so you don't have to specifically search for a place to see how busy it is currently. This is a useful feature in 2020.
During the event (or really, the premiere of the video, because this is 2020), which was set for the most relaxing music, Google's head of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, also noted that his 2019 BERT update Natural Language Understanding Part of His Research The system is now used for nearly all queries and is available in multiple languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, German and Amharic. It's part of the more than 3,600 updates the company made to its research product in 2019.
All of these announcements are happening against the backdrop of various governments scrutinizing Google's business practices, so it's probably not surprising that the event also placed an emphasis on Google's privacy practices and Raghavan regularly talked about "open access" and that Google Search is free for everyone, everywhere, with ranking criteria applied "equally" to all websites. I'm sure Yelp and other Google competitors would not entirely agree with the latter statement.
