Google has announced a improvement in its search function, supported by Artificial Intelligence. with which it intends to improve the quality of the information it offers its users. This improvement is composed of several parts, of which the first is the snippet optimization that appears at the top of the first page of your search results.
This snippet appears in a specific box, and its text appears in a larger font than the rest. It offers useful information that, at a glance, seeks to answer the question or doubt raised in the search. Its presence has among its purposes the need to click on a link to obtain a response, unless it is necessary to deepen the information.
So that the snippets always show the most accurate information in response to the search, Google is using its most recent Artificial Intelligence model, MUM (Multitask Unified Model, which means Multitask Unified Model). This model, according to the company, should help its systems to «understand the notion of consensus, which is when there are several high-quality sources on the web and they all agree on the same fact«.
Using this model, among other things, will allow Google to check the information in a snippet and compare it with other high-quality sources to see if the facts it shows are the same in all of them. The idea behind this is to make the snippet give users more reliable answers.
In addition, Google’s new Artificial Intelligence model is helping the company not use snippets when it doesn’t make sense to do so. Specifically, when there may not be a concrete and definitive answer to a question. All so that the snippets are seen as more reliable from now on.
Another of the improvements that will appear in the Google search engine is the expansion of the details related to each of the results of a search. Specifically, Google is going to expand and improve the function About this result (About this result), which appears when you click on the three dots to the right of a specific result. This feature will soon start showing more information, such as how far a source has been circulated, opinions about it, or whether a company is owned by another, among other data.
Also, the feature is coming soon available for the Google app, which users can access by swiping up on the screen from the bottom navigation bar. Apart from this, it is going to expand to several languages on the web before the end of the year. So far it is only available in English, and soon it will be available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese and Indonesian as well.
On the other hand, Google is also working on increasing its notifications about content, which it launched some time ago for new information, as is the case with breaking news that is still in development. Google warns in this type of information so that its users know that the information could change and that checking it over time may be advisable. This warning system will now also warn if there are not enough good quality results in a search. Then, users can be prompted to check sources. They can also modify the search to try to find more information.
These improvements come very shortly after Google made several changes to its search engine, focused on improving search results for expressions in quotes. The company claims that with this enhancement, users will have more context about where quoted text appears in a result.
