Over the years google has tackled several deep, technical challenges in order to develop it into what it is today. There is a lot that has gone into building google to be the search engine that it is today. However, the reality is that search is never a solved problem – there is constantly a need to evolve and with that a number of problems arise along the journey.
Here are some of the biggest technological breakthroughs google has made over the years— and how they continue to push the boundaries of innovation — as they build and improve their search engine.
1. Delivering Quality Results
Google places emphasis on ranking information not only on what is relevant but what is likely to be reliable and helpful. This insight is what set the search engine part from day one. Their PageRank algorithm not only takes into account whether words on a page match, but how sites link to one another that reveals which pages are important or authoritative.
Google has also focused on adapting techniques as the web evolves and as technology improves. For example, with the rise in misinformation, they’ve developed ways to recognize if topics might be more susceptible to unreliable content, like conspiracy theories or medical misinformation. Once they have determined the reliability of the content google readjusts their ranking towards content that is more authoritative.
Google also conducts thousands of quality evaluations every year to make sure they’re meeting high bar for quality. They regularly make broad updates to their systems, called core updates, including more specialized updates, like helpful content updates, to continue delivering useful results.
The company also displays notices when topics change or when they don’t have high confidence in the quality of results to caution people to approach results with caution. They also invest heavily in information literacy tools to help people check sources and get proper context in order to evaluate findings.
2. Deciphering Meaning
One of Google’s core focus is evaluating and understanding information and queries. In the past their systems were built on word matching, but now factors like spelling has become important. In the past, when a spelling mistake was made, web pages with incorrect spelling of the search terms would appear – to tackle this issue google built their first ML system in search.
Google’s Knowlegde Graph gave the company insight into how people, places and things in the world relate to each other – providing them with a more humanistic understanding of world.
Large language models like BERT, developed by the Google Research team, helped the team to decipher natural language queries, in order to deliver relevant results across languages used around the world.
These models can take learnings from one language and apply them to others, to return better results in the many languages that Search is offered in. They also built various tools like Google Translate to break assist in breaking down language barriers.
3. Understanding Images, Videos and More
Through making use of the latest developments in natural language processing (NLP), in 2008 they launched a feature to search with voice prompts.
Google took this a step further through developing a “hum to search” feature for moments where you have a tune stuck in your mind and want to find the song but don’t know the lyrics.
in 2015, advances in computer vision made it possible to search what you see with Lens. The mobile phone camera was transformed into a way to explore and ask questions about the world. for example if you saw a flower you could take a phone and google would give you more information about that flower.
Today people conduct 12 billion visual searches every month with Lens. Last year, the company launched multisearch, which allows users to add text to visual searches.
4. Spotting and Stopping Spam
Anyone who has ever looked into their email spam folder can appreciate all the work that goes into keeping that junk out of their inbox. On Search, google has built advanced systems to fight spam. Without their advanced protections, search results would be clogged with completely irrelevant information, phishing attempts and links to malware.
They are constantly developing new techniques and implementing updates to their ranking systems to protect against spam. But spam also adapts and evolves, requiring constant attention.
In recent years, the team have applied new AI-powered techniques to spam detection, which has helped them to keep search results over 99% spam free. This remains a big area of investment for them: as long as people come to Google looking for information, spammers will continue to try and breach protections.
5. Making Search Safer
Over the years, the company has maintained a strong commitment to their principles of maximizing access to information, while helping people stay safe and in control. They aim to help people find information that’s within the bounds of legal expression, while not inadvertently exposing them to low-quality or harmful content that they haven’t asked to see.
They have done this through expanding policy protections for people to remove sensitive personal information from results, and through improving their ranking systems with safety and inclusivity in mind.
An example of this would be their launching of improvements towards reducing unwanted explicit content from ranking highly in Search and updates to blur explicit imagery by default, and ranking improvements to limit the reach of sites that use exploitive practices.
They’ve also updated policies so that people under the age of 18 can have images of themselves removed from Search, and launched new tools like results about you to make it easy to control how their personal information shows up in search results.
