Credit: https://blog.google/products/search/smarter-organization-top-stories-search/?utm_content=buffere5ab4&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer
Looking for current events on mobile can be lots of fun especially with Google’s new machine learning ability. The search engine giant has just rolled out a new look News tab on mobile that is called “smarter organization that is being powered by machine learning.
What we had before this update was a situation where Top Stories lists two articles or thereabouts followed by a carousal of more stories. Now, there is an interesting change or call it transformation as Google is now curating this section in an improved manner. This is even better appreciated when you have more news items that are closely related on mobile search.
“When you’re searching for information on a timely topic–a recent sports upset or the latest scientific breakthrough–you see a carousel of articles at the top of your Search results highlighting relevant news. Now, when there are multiple stories related to your search, we’ll also organize the results by story so it’s easier to understand what’s most relevant and you can make a more informed decision on which specific articles to explore.”
For example, a search for “NASA news,” might provide results grouped under the distinct news stories “NASA adds five companies to moon bid” and “NASA detects water vapor on Jupiter’s moon Europa,” along with additional results under “Also in the news.”
The good thing about Google’s new smart Top Stories is that it allows for more high-quality content that is not the most recent alone, but from different sources as well. The goal is to bring “more context and perspective to the day’s news.”
“Our research has shown that clustering results into clearly-defined stories is critical in helping people easily navigate the results and identify the best content for their needs.”
The new Top Stories carousal has already rolled out to users today on mobile, and is currently only available for US English. More languages will be added in the very near future.
Things got even better with a major update announced by the search engine giant last October. The update, which perhaps, is the most significant in the last couple of years, will improve how natural results are presented.
Underlining how search queries over the years have transformed and how Google has been able to improve Search to meet the heavy demands from users, the company explained why it is important to improve on understanding of natural search queries. This will be achieved by applying a neural network-based technique known as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers or BERT for short. BERT according to Google, “enables anyone to train their own state-of-the-art question answering system.”
