Google unveils new search tools

Google said in its quest to create the perfect search engine, it cannot afford to rest on its laurels.

The company's comments came at an event billed as a "state of the union" on search as it unveiled new products that aim to push search in a new direction.

Google has over 63% of the US market compared to rival Yahoo with 20%.

"The race in search is far from over and innovation and continued improvement is absolutely pivotal," said Google's Marissa Mayer.

"I've said this many times but search is still in its infancy. Our engineers are worried about what is the next big thing in search and how are they going to find it," said Ms Mayer who is the vice president of search products and user experience.

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Google Squared

During the "Searchology" event at Google's Mountain View headquarters, Ms Mayer and her team showcased four new products that she said would give users a "different way to look at the web."

Google Squared is still experimental and far from perfect said the company

One of the more experimental was called Google Squared which will go public in the next month or so. It takes information from the web and displays it in a spreadsheet in "split seconds," something Ms Mayer said would normally take someone a half a day to do.

During the demonstration, a query for "small dog" was typed into the search box. Seconds later a table popped up showing photographs of various dogs, their origin, weight and height in a clear and simple layout.

... Ms Mayer described this product as "transformative" ... "What they are basically doing is looking for structures on the web that seem to imply facts. Like something 'is' something.

"Different tables, different structures, and then corroborating the evidence around whether or not something is a fact by looking at whether that fact occurs across pages.

"This is all in the secret sauce of what we are doing and it takes an incredible amount of compute power to create those squares," said Ms Mayer.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Google unveils new search tools.