Imagine a scenario where you are left puzzled on the road figuring where to head next? Have a maths question to solve, have tried 100 times and haven’t come up with a solution? Is looking out to the nearest restaurant to order food to order?
What will you do?
By now, you would be thinking simple, I would Google it! Well, Right! Given our dependence on Internet and technology, it is difficult to imagine a day without “Google” on our smartphones or laptops.
Google Search is by far the biggest and most used search engine on world wide web that handles about 3 billion searches every day! It is backed by a complex set of algorithms which not only show up thousands of results in 0.03 seconds but also function platform’s autocompleted predictions making the search experience faster and smoother.
The technology major has recently talked in a blog post about how its search feature works and gives appropriate results chalking out unwanted information.
Before we dive deeper into the details of how the system works, it is important to understand that the autocomplete results are predictions and not suggestions.This simply means Google at its best can predict what users need and what not, giving them appropriate suggestions.
Google Search adviser, Danny Sullivan explains that Google makes the predictions based on two parameters:
- Recent searches that are trending and whether they match with the characters entered in the search bar
- Previous searches and related location of the user.
The predictions made by Google also change as a user types in new characters in the search panel.
For example, if a user is typing “New Z”, the algorithm will show ‘New Zealand’ related results. However, if the moment user writes ‘New Za’, the algorithm will scrap out previous results and present next popular topic based on your location, interest and other parameters.
Some predictions that do not align with autocomplete policies are automatically removed by Google. This includes violent, sexually explicit, hateful and dangerous predictions that provoke negative feelings or are related to piracy or copyright issues.
Search Result Varies From Device to Device
The powerful algorithm has a way with devices. For instance, a user would see 10 results on a desktop while only 5 in mobile for the same query typed owing to the lesser availability of screen space. However, Google search is working on to reduce such inconsistency with autocomplete results.