Inside Search
The official Google Search blog
Find flights to destinations worldwide
March 15, 2012
(Cross-posted on the
ITA Software by Google blog
)
If you’re in the U.S. and thinking of hitting the slopes in the Swiss Alps or heading to Sydney for a getaway, you can now use
Flight Search
to find and book a flight quickly and easily.
Since we
launched
Flight Search, we’ve heard from many globetrotters eager to use the feature to search for destinations outside the U.S. Starting today, you can find flights, including international destinations, from the U.S. quickly and conveniently.
As you consider vacation possibilities, maybe you’d like to go to Australia but are flexible to fly into either Sydney or Perth based on whichever fare is more affordable. A quick click over each city on the map will show the different options available to you almost instantly -- and click the chart next to the dates to show alternative dates so you can make the best choice for your trip.
Likewise, if you’re looking to hop over to Europe for a weekend from New York City and are flexible with your departure and arrival airports, you can see the options for your gateway. We hope you have fun with our latest update to Flight Search.
At this stage we've included more than 500 airports outside the U.S. If your ideal destination isn't yet available, we're working hard on expanding our global coverage and adding more routes in the future. Our goal is to make booking travel as fast and enjoyable as possible.
Posted by Eric Zimmerman, Product Manager
Video! The search quality meeting, uncut (annotated)
March 12, 2012
It took eight video cameras and 16 microphones, but we’ve done something new and special to give you another inside look at
how search works
. Today we’ve published, for the first time, a video with the uncut discussion of a proposed
algorithm change
(in this case, an upcoming change to our spell correction system). The language can be technical, so we've included annotations to provide some context for the discussion (and have a little fun!).
The footage was captured on December 1, 2011 at our weekly “Quality Launch Review” meeting. We hold the meeting on Thursdays to discuss possible algorithmic improvements and make decisions about what to launch. As usual, meeting participants gathered in Mountain View and joined on videoconference from remote offices around the globe, including our offices in Moscow, New York, Zurich, Seoul, Haifa and Tokyo. Check out the video for a flavor of the kinds of topics and data the team discusses before making many of the important changes to our system.
A few things you’ll observe:
Even relatively subtle changes get intense scrutiny by our
search evaluation
and
ranking
teams. The specific change discussed in this video improves spelling suggestions for searches with more than 10 words and it impacts only .1% of our traffic. Still, you can see the scrutiny and thoughtfulness that goes into approving this change.
Every change has a dedicated search quality analyst assigned to study the impact. This analyst is not part of the engineering team building the change, but instead offers a separate opinion on whether the change is good for users.
The search team relies heavily on the results of experimental data to make decisions. During the meeting, we rely on detailed analyst reports including the results of click evaluations and side-by-side experiments. These reports can sometimes be more than 25 pages long.
Launch reports include specific examples to illustrate broader trends in the data. Rather than manually change one example, our engineers look for algorithmic ways to improve millions of queries.
Search algorithm improvements often rely on and impact many different systems, so engineers with expertise in different areas all need to come together to make the best decision for the user, balancing all the tradeoffs involved (relevance, spam, latency, cost, language impact, etc.)
As I said in the video, this is an experiment, and we’re interested to hear
what you think
. For all the search geeks out there, we hope you enjoy it! For a video summary of our process, I can also recommend the
video
we posted last August.
Posted by Amit Singhal, Senior VP and Google Fellow
A completely redesigned Google Search App for Windows 7.5 phones
March 7, 2012
(Cross-posted on the
Google Mobile Blog
)
Windows Phone owners can now get easy access to the Google Search App, available in the
Windows Phone Marketplace. Check out these features which help you get useful results fast:
Google Autocomplete:
As you type in your search, our autocomplete feature offers search predictions that often match your intended search term making search entry easier and faster.
Voice Search:
With our voice feature, you can avoid typing all together. Simply press the microphone and begin speaking your query.
My Location:
With your permission, Google can use your device location to provide nearby results easily and accurately. For instance, a search for “coffee shops” quickly displays the nearest places you can go to for a cup of coffee.
The new Google Search app now has Voice Search (left) as well as Google Autocomplete (right)
You can download the app from the
Windows Marketplace
and try it for yourself. It’s available worldwide in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.
Posted by Ryan Doherty, Software Engineer
Bringing more secure search around the globe
March 5, 2012
Several months ago we made a change to our default search experience on
google.com
— when you’re signed into Google, we
add SSL encryption
to increase the privacy and security of your web searches. The change
encrypts your search queries
and our search results page, which is particularly important when you’re using an open, unsecured Internet connection.
We’re now ready to expand this protection, so over the next few weeks we will begin introducing SSL search beyond
google.com
to our local domains around the globe. As before, we hope that these efforts to expand the use of SSL encryption in our services motivate other companies to adopt SSL more broadly.
Posted by Michael Safyan, Software Engineer
Introducing a new local search experience across your devices
March 5, 2012
(Cross-posted on the
Google Mobile Blog
)
How often are you doing a Google search from your computer to find information about a place before going there? Now, next time you go to Google.com on your Android phone or iPhone, information about that place will be conveniently available under the new “Recent” icon. Calling, getting directions or seeing details about the places you just searched for is now only one tap away.
We provide this new convenience feature for users who have
Web History
enabled and are logged into Google when doing their search. Start by
searching for a place
on your PC or other devices, then login to Google.com’s mobile homepage and check the Recent icon. Information about previously searched places will be available under the Recent icon for about three days.
The new “Recent” icon shows information about places you have recently searched for on any of your devices. Try swiping to the right to see more icons for other categories of places.
Next time you are heading to a place you have recently searched for, no need to worry if you can’t remember the address or phone number. Just go to Google.com on your smartphone and tap on the “Recent” icon. We hope you find this new feature useful!
Posted by Junichi Uekawa, Software Engineer
Update March 22: Edited to reflect that local information will be available for about three days.
Spice up your iGoogle page with new, immersive, full-page themes
March 1, 2012
Last September we
introduced
some design changes to iGoogle for a more streamlined and
consistent experience
across Google products. Today, you can preview a few more improvements to iGoogle’s look and feel that simplify the page further while offering even more personalization.
You can now brighten up your iGoogle page by choosing from our new selection of beautiful and immersive full-page themes. We partnered with
iStockphoto
to bring your favorite Gmail themes to iGoogle - just pop open our
theme directory
to try them out. You can now share the best themes and gadgets with your friends on Google+ simply by clicking on the +1 button. You’ll also notice some new icons to access your settings, add gadgets, or change your theme. These icons, as well as a couple other minor changes to the page, bring more consistency with other Google products.
These new features are available globally, and if you’d like to try them out, just click on
Switch to the new look
in the bottom right of iGoogle. This will be rolling out to everyone as the default view in a few weeks, but if you'd like to temporarily revert back to the old look, you can do so via the settings menu.
Posted by Conrad Lo, Product Manager
Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February
February 27, 2012
This month we have many improvements to celebrate. With 40 changes reported, that marks a new record for our
monthly series
on search quality. Most of the updates rolled out earlier this month, and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow. We continue to improve many of our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more. Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine.
Here’s the list for February:
More coverage for related searches.
[launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks.
[launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
Less duplication in expanded sitelinks.
[launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for
expanded sitelinks
. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page.
We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
More locally relevant predictions in YouTube.
[project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
More accurate detection of official pages.
[launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
Refreshed per-URL country information.
[Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search.
[launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms.
[project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of
policies for autocomplete
for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
“Site:” query update
[launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search.
[launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
Interval based history tracking for indexing.
[project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
Improvements to foreign language synonyms.
[launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
Disabling two old fresh query classifiers.
[launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
More organized search results for Google Korea.
[launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
Fresher images.
[launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
Update to the Google bar.
[project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the
November redesign
with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages.
[launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
Improvements to travel-related searches.
[launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our
Flight Search feature
with users getting more accurate flight results.
Data refresh for related searches signal.
[launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
International launch of shopping rich snippets.
[project codename “rich snippets”]
Shopping rich snippets
help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
Improvements to Korean spelling.
This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an "IME", or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
Improvements to freshness.
[launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
Web History in 20 new countries.
With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you've visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
Improved snippets for video channels.
Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
Improvements to ranking for local search results.
[launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
Improvements to English spell correction.
[launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
Improvements to coverage of News Universal.
[launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
Consolidation of signals for spiking topics.
[launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature.
[launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
Visual refresh to account settings page.
We completed a visual refresh of the
account settings page
, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly
evolving design
.
Panda update.
This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
Link evaluation.
We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
SafeSearch update.
We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
Spam update.
In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
Improved local results.
We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
And here are a few more changes we’ve already blogged about separately:
Flight Search on mobile
Improved health searches
Better related searches for images
Upcoming concert dates
Posted by Amit Singhal, Senior VP and Google Fellow
Labels
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