If you’re a frequent user of Google’s voice search functionality, you’ll be happy to know that the ubiquitous search engine is now better able to understand natural language queries.
In a blog post published earlier today, Google details some of the ways it has improved its search engine over the past couple of months.
To start, Google now better understands questions involving superlatives and ordered items, meaning users can ask questions like, “who are the tallest players on the Blue Jays?,” and, “what are the largest cities in Canada?,” and they’ll get back useful information.
Moreover, Google says its search engine is now also better at understanding questions involving dates, so users can ask questions like “what songs did Taylor Swift record in 2014?”
Combining these two improvements allows users to ask questions like the one featured in the lead image, “who was the U.S. President when the Angels won the World Series?,” though as Google itself notes, this part of its algorithm still needs work. Asking the search engine, for example, who the Prime Minister of Canada was when the Blue Jays last won the World Series (Kim Campbell) does not produce a result.
The company doesn’t mention RankBrain specifically, but it’s likely the recently profiled artificial intelligence has played a significant part in improving the Google app’s search ability. According to Bloomberg, the AI already works through a large fraction of the millions of searches that are completed by Google each and every day, and its main purpose is to tackle particularly obtuse queries like, “what’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?”
[source]Google[/source]
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