PERSONALISED SEARCH, AUTOMAGIC TRANSLATION AND MORE…
Google’s VP in charge of search quality, Udi Manber, gives a rare interview to Popular Mechanics.
Here’s a few interesting things from the articles.
1) There were 450 changes (he calls them “improvements”) to the natural search algorithm in the past year.
2) Personalised search is well underway. For users logged into a Google account and have opted to save their search history, Google will utilise your search history to refine the search results, just for you. A key takeout from this is that ranking, as a measure of success for natural search, is of waning importance. Oh, and search results should get better for users.
3) Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) – this is a recently launched feature that can take a user’s query, translate it into another language, do the search in that language, and then translate the results back into the user’s own language, using Google Translation. It’s available in 12 languages. This is huge and opens up billions of pages of new content.
