Windows 10: Improving Google Search for the next 20 years

Brink · Sep 24, 2018

Growing up in India, there was one good library in my town that I had access to—run by the British Council. It was modest by western standards, and I had to take two buses just to get there. But I was lucky, because for every child like me, there were many more who didn’t have access to the same information that I did. Access to information changed my life, bringing me to the U.S. to study computer science and opening up huge possibilities for me that would not have been available without the education I had.

The British Council Library in my hometown.

When Google started 20 years ago, our mission was to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That seemed like an incredibly ambitious mission at the time—even considering that in 1998 the web consisted of just 25 million pages (roughly the equivalent of books in a small library).

Fast forward to today, and now we index hundreds of billions of pages in our index—more information than all the libraries in the world could hold. We’ve grown to serve people all over the world, offering Search in more than 150 languages and over 190 countries.

Through all of this, we’ve remained grounded in our mission. In fact, providing greater access to information is as core to our work today as it was when we first started. And while almost everything has changed about technology and the information available to us, the core principles of Search have stayed the same.

First and foremost, we focus on the user. Whether you’re looking for recipes, studying for an exam, or finding information on where to vote, we’re focused on serving your information needs.

We strive to give you the most relevant, highest quality information as quickly as possible. This was true when Google started with the Page Rank algorithm—the foundational technology to Search. And it’s just as true today.

We see billions of queries every day, and 15 percent of queries are ones we’ve never seen before. Given this scale, the only way to provide Search effectively is through an algorithmic approach. This helps us not just solve all the queries we’ve seen yesterday, but also all the ones we can’t anticipate for tomorrow.

Finally, we rigorously test every change we make. A key part of this testing is the rater guidelines which define our goals in search, and which are publicly available for anyone to see. Every change to Search is evaluated by experimentation and by raters using these guidelines. Last year alone, we ran more than 200,000 experiments that resulted in 2,400+ changes to search. Search will serve you better today than it did yesterday, and even better tomorrow.

As Google marks our 20th anniversary, I wanted to share a first look at the next chapter of Search, and how we’re working to make information more accessible and useful for people everywhere. This next chapter is driven by three fundamental shifts in how we think about Search:

The shift from answers to journeys: To help you resume tasks where you left off and learn new interests and hobbies, we’re bringing new features to Search that help you with ongoing information needs.

The shift from queries to providing a queryless way to get to information: We can surface relevant information related to your interests, even when you don’t have a specific query in mind.

And the shift from text to a more visual way of finding information: We’re bringing more visual content to Search and completely redesigning Google Images to help you find information more easily.

Underpinning each of these are our advancements in AI, improving our ability to understand language in ways that weren’t possible when Google first started. This is incredibly exciting, because over 20 years ago when I studied neural nets at school, they didn’t actually work very well...at all!

But we’ve now reached the point where neural networks can help us take a major leap forward from understanding words to understanding concepts. Neural embeddings, an approach developed in the field of neural networks, allow us to transform words to fuzzier representations of the underlying concepts, and then match the concepts in the query with the concepts in the document. We call this technique neural matching. This can enable us to address queries like: “why does my TV look strange?” to surface the most relevant results for that question, even if the exact words aren’t contained in the page. (By the way, it turns out the reason is called the soap opera effect).

Finding the right information about my TV is helpful in the moment. But AI can have much more profound effects. Whether it’s predicting areas that might be affected in a flood, or helping you identify the best job opportunities for you, AI can dramatically improve our ability to make information more accessible and useful.

I’ve worked on Search at Google since the early days of its existence. One of the things that keeps me so inspired about Search all these years is our mission and how timeless it is. Providing greater access to information is fundamental to what we do, and there are always more ways we can help people access the information they need. That’s what pushes us forward to continue to make Search better for our users. And that’s why our work here is never done.
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Source: Improving Search for the next 20 years

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fussybob · Sep 24, 2018

IE11 Google Toolbar no auto search suggestions, no search history?

Since the last Win 10 update my Google Toolbar won't list any search suggestions as I type and there is no search history listed. The Google tool bar will allow a search, but after a few searches no search history shows and no "clear search" button is listed either.

I have turnd on "Suggest searches as you type", and "store search histroy on my computer" in the Google Toolbar options.

Any suggestions to fix this?

JosephHHarrisonJr · Sep 24, 2018

Google as default search

On my new Samsung Notebook 9 I want to make Google the default search engine in Internet Explorer. I open Explorer, click on tools, click on manage add-ons and then click on search providers. That shows me a list which includes Bing (twice) and Google.
In the far right column under "search suggestions" Bing is listed as "enabled" and Google is listed as "not available." How do I make Google available?

hurricane51 · Sep 24, 2018

Edge Search Does Not Permit Change of Region

I got these suggestions from the Microsoft Community forum.No. 1 worked for me:

Thank you for posting the query on Microsoft Community. I am glad to assist you on this.
We have reproduce the issue here and we are able to access non-regional search for google using Microsoft Edge.
I would suggest you to try the below steps and check if it helps.
Step 1:
Clear browsing data option of Microsoft Edge and check if you face the issue. To do so perform the steps below.

Click on the More actions icon next to the feedback icon present on top right corner of the Project Spartan homepage.

Select Settings and click on Choose what to clear.

Check the boxes Browsing history, Cookies and saved website data and Cached data and files and click on Clear.

Step 2:
I suggest you to create a new user account and check if the issue occurs.

Go to Settings.

Choose Accounts and then select Family and other users.

Select add someone else on this PC.

Enter a user name and hit next.

Click on Finish.

Sign out from the current Account and Log into the new account.

Step 3:
It could also happen because of network issue. I suggest you to try with different network connection and check if it helps.

Windows 10: Improving Google Search for the next 20 years

Improving Google Search for the next 20 years

Improving Google Search for the next 20 years

Improving Google Search for the next 20 years

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