Google’s back with more improvements. Off late, Google’s been making the news on a regular basis. Check out all the WATBlog Google stories here. However, their focus on social media notwithstanding, the whole thing about Google being a Search Engine is disappearing. They recently tried reworking their infrastructure withCaffeine. But if you look at why Google’s been making news, it’s no longer just about search. With Google spreading itself so thin, is it losing out to Bing?
The numbers out this August by ComScore reveal that Bing is indeed gaining momentum, though Google’s volumes have also increased. Bing is now poised at slightly over 10% of the market. Which could explain Google reworking the focus on search.
Their Blog, a few days back announced the Jump feature. Now, jump directly to what you “could” be looking for. When you search in Google, it gives you a few lines of text from the site to give you an idea of the page’s content – they term it a search snippet.
Their whole take is that occasionally, only a part of the page is relevant to your search, and you should be entitled to land on that page directly as opposed to going through the entire content. Taking Wikipedia as a basis for example, assuming someone Googles trans fat, chances are they are looking for Nutritional Guidelinesand what they should eat and avoid and NOT the chemical details. Hence they’ve decided that these links will surface on top so that people can click on them directly.
The search snippet system also works for more specific searches and is not Wikipedia specific. Searching forgood cholesterol level will surface a page with one result as the American Heart Association site. The specific information is just one bit called Your HDL (good) cholesterol level. Since the search was specific, the result includes a “Jump to” feature with which you may go to that specific part of the page directly.
The search snippet feature works especially well with Wikipedia (probably since the content is so well categorised and arranged). A search for Charles Darwin for example give me a “Jump to” option to “Buy DVDs about Charles Darwin”. The highlighted bits are the Jump To links.
This feature is undoubtedly useful. Bing seems to have snippets too – I did a search for trans fat on Bing and it too had the same snippets that Google did. It did not however give the same result for “good cholesterol level”.
The question is, how much more can you tweak the search results and how specific can they get. What’s the Alpha and Omega of search? Here’s Eric Schmidt’s perspective. The CEO of Google spoke to TechCrunch and said “Connect it to the Brain”
PS: If you’re wondering about the Thumbnail, it was Google’s 11th birthday on September 27th. Hence the two Ls.
