The way we search online has improved dramatically over the last few years, Google has said.
In a Q&A, the company’s SEO guru Danny Sullivan claimed that the company’s ongoing work into making sure it delivers the right results is paying off.
“Over the last seven years, our internal metrics based on quality rater data show we’ve decreased the number of irrelevant results by over 50%,” he said.
Google Search boost
Sullivan, Google’s Public Liaison for Search, revealed that the company conducted more than 800,000 experiments and ongoing quality tests in 2021 to make sure people get the results they need.
Answering the question “What do you wish more people knew about Google Search?” Sullivan looked to emphasize the sheer scale of the platform, and the work it does.
“I don’t think most people realize how much work goes into regularly improving Search,” he noted. “We make thousands of improvements throughout the year — more than 5,000 in 2021 alone.”
Looking forward, Sullivan and Google are both looking to AI in order to help push the next generation of online search.
“Our deep understanding of information and the world around us — made possible by advancements in AI — is helping us reimagine what it means to “search.” he noted. “Soon, you’ll be able to search with images and text simultaneously using Google Lens, helping you learn about the physical world and ask questions about what you see in a more intuitive way.”
Sullivan noted that Google has seen a 60% increase in natural language queries on Search since 2015, with the company investing heavily in natural language processing (NLP) tools, having launched BERT, “a neural network-based ranking improvement that can better understand natural language and longer queries” back in 2019.
“After more than two decades thinking about Search, what’s most exciting to me is that it’s never a solved problem. We’ve only started to scratch the surface of how Google can help make information accessible and useful.”
