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July 17, 2008
Google On User Intent in Search Queries
In the latest installment from Google about search quality, the topic du jour is user intent. Google Fellow Amit Singhal is at the helm of the Official Google blog again and wrote about efforts Google makes to help searchers find what they're looking for.
Singhal writes, "Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want." I guess that depends on who you ask. Perhaps the search engines have approached it this way, but users have always been in the give me what I want column. Either way, today it's all about what searchers want.
Using the example of kofee annan, Singhal says Google knows a searcher is really looking for Kofi Annan, and will prompt the searcher as such. However, in a query for kofee beans, Google knows that the searcher is looking for coffee beans. Basically, Google isn't a spelling-monger.
Singhal also says that Google knows when Dr means doctor and when it means drive, and that searching for new york times square church is a search for an actual church and not something in the New York Times.
Understanding user intent is also something that drives Google's initiatives in both personalized and universal search.
Finally, Singhal introduces Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). The technology allows searchers to discover information in a language other than the one they're searching in and use Google's translation technology to access it.
What do you think about Google's understanding of user intent? Leave a comment and let us know!
Posted by Nathania Johnson on July 17, 2008 12:37 PM
Comments
Intent nor literal results for a search this morning came up with total bogus results. Google search results by city, city search results etc etc etc all could not find me the reference I was looking for.
When it doesn't work it misses by miles!
AussieWebmaster July 17, 2008 2:59 PM
Not speaking particularly about Google, in general it's virtually impossible for a search engine to uniquely understand a user's intent. That is why there are 10 results on the page. If the search engine knew exactly what you were looking for, there'd only be one result: the answer.
But the situation is becoming more challenging as the amount of content on the internet grows. There are now tens of billions of items on the internet and it's mathematically impossible to match all of that to sets of two- and three-word queries, making it difficult to keep all of the page 1 results relevant.
That is why Google, and everyone else, is looking for more information regarding the user's intent beyond the keywords. This involves things like looking at the particular user's search history as well as the search histories of other people with similar profiles. It's also worth looking at the click patterns of all of the other individuals who've entered a similar query in the past. There's also a lot of other information that they throw in there, like geographic location and whatnot.
The end result is, however, incomplete, as all of those signals decay very rapidly. What a user searched for last week, or even five minutes ago, might have very little to do with his or her current intent.
Mark Cramer July 17, 2008 3:39 PM
Based on what I'm seeing in their tools, it can be manipulated. I'd rather explain privately to someone at MSN who can build the fix into the msn engine rather than give G another advantage though.
Gab Goldenberg July 20, 2008 2:39 AM
