Google tweaks search engine results reporting

Google has announced it is adding two new features to its main search engine to improve the ease of searching.

The first is a new technology that has been installed to improve the suggested related search information that appears at the bottom of a search page. The new application broadens the scale of related searches to related concepts within the search term.

“For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that "angular momentum," "special relativity," "big bang" and " quantum mechanic" are related terms that could help you find what you need,” said Ori Allon, technical lead of Google’s Search Quality Team, on the Google blog.

The new related searches are being rolled out and are now available in 37 language searches.

The second improvement comes in a lengthening of the snippet information, the précis of searched sites that appears below hyperlinks.

With searches for three or more words then the snippets will be lengthened to give more information. The change has been made because longer, more complex search terms often don’t include information of all the terms searched for.

“Suppose you were looking for information about Earth's rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun],” said Ken Wilder, snippets team engineer at Google.

“A normal-length snippet wouldn't be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics.”

Since 2007, Google has been in the midst of a campaign to retool and update its flagship search engine product. The company has pursued such areas as multimedia and multi-source as well as ideas such as cross-language search.

Earlier this month, the company debuted an updated image search service for mobile handsets.