Google, the social networking giant has announced that it is updating its Mobile Search app on Android and iOS platforms by adding more capabilities. Google app can now better understand more complex queries with the capability of natural language recognition and decipher the meaning of questions. Google has to solve the difficulty of finding information within apps rather than just the world wide web more frequently, which will in many instances get assistance from biggies like Facebook.
Facebook has opened its arms to Google by deep linking its app content and enabling Google App Indexing which shows in the search results. The search engine giant says that the Google app is now able to handle more complex queries including superlatives, ordered items, and dates, as well as some complicated combinations. It can understand the “meaning” of what a user is asking and deciphers the meaning of those queries.
Google Understands Complex Questions
Google now solves complex queries by breaking down a query to understand the semantics of each part separately and piecing together different parts to figure out the overall intent. The advancements will also benefit Knowledge Graph to get more powerful and accurate. Google follows Knowledge Graph which was introduced in 2012 that provides information on individual brands, countries and public figures, Google is now seeking to understand the meaning of questions, rather than simply understanding each component of a phrase individually.
On a blog post, the company described how the app works. For example, let’s say the question is “Who was the US President when the Angels won the World series?” The question will be fragmented into four parts and the algorithm accumulates the following relevant details:
- List of Presidents
- A Country
- A Baseball team
- World Series Winners by Year
The company then combines these pieces of information to get the whole picture as shown in the above image. “We’re still growing and learning, which means we make mistakes. Ask Google “Who was Dakota Johnson’s mom in the movie?”, and we’ll respond with the movies of Dakota Johnson’s real-life mother Melanie Griffith, not the actor Jennifer Ehle who played Anastasia’s mother Carla in the 50 Shades of Grey movie.” wrote Satyajeet Salgar, Product Manager at Google in a blog post.
The idea of Google is to further enhance the understanding capability of Google app to a point where a user no longer has to think about feeding the appropriate keywords.