Google and the Search Engine Revolution Khaleej Times

Tom Simonette*

Tech giant Google is constantly working to improve and develop its search service on mobile devices and smartphones, making data come to it on a golden platter, as the saying goes, by automatically providing information that no one has ever thought of searching on the Internet before.

Billions of searches are conducted on Google engines every day, but we still search for certain information outside the internet, and leading companies seek to understand this information and work hard to provide it in this way.

“Someone might ask a friend for information, or use a dictionary or book to verify the validity of some law of physics, without ever consulting the web,” said John Wiley, senior director at Google.

If Google is to achieve its stated mission of organizing information and making it accessible to everyone, it must first discover the hidden cognitive needs of users and provide the best possible service.

Willey noted that sampling experiments and asking users what they want to know at the moment is one of the best methods and procedures for developing a search engine, adding that using these tools, especially on mobile phones, is a relatively new technology that gives us better information than before.

It is worth noting that the information provided by mobile devices through GPS systems and other sensor chips can be used to guess what the user needs and provide it to him without him asking for it. In this regard, Willy said that SEO provides you with it. You need it at the right moment, without even asking.

In fact, Google has already taken the first steps towards this goal, as it provides information about weather, air traffic, directions and other information when it thinks the user needs it, for example, if the user is at an airport. The engine automatically shows him data about … flights to and from the city where he lives.

Google is developing a new type of search engine that will be very different from the company’s original service. On this issue, Jonas Michel, a researcher at the University of Texas, said: “In the future, you may want to search to get completely new information about the environment where you live, so you have to be “very precise about the place, the event, and the moment.”

Finding future data to answer questions involves more than just accessing the web, as Google combines location data with information available on the ground, so that, for example, a user at a bus stop can know the arrival time of a bus by searching the engine on his mobile phone.

Willey is very focused on finding more information and data that isn’t searched through the engines, and because the research he’s doing may give the company a clearer picture of different types of data, Willey added: “We’re going to continue our work on this research, as the nature of search is changing as it’s very useful for making sense of large amounts of information, and it helps us improve the quality of our search engines.”