Google recently announced the broad release of changes that will provide its users with better results for complicated searches.

Ori Allon, technical lead for the company’s search quality team, explained that the team were trying to gain a better understanding of the exact meaning of different queries and the context of those queries in order to provide users with the most relevant results possible.

The new technology provided a deeper analysis of the content of web pages by examining web content related to the search query and identifying entities (such as people, places, or concepts) those which are most relevant. The processing takes place at high speed and occurs within the fraction of a second that Google takes to return its search results.

In some cases, where search queries are more complicated, Google will not provide alternate searches in a new “search refinements” section that appears either above or below the list of results.

“Search refinements are not a novelty,” said Bruce Mills, Joint CEO of 3W Consulting, Contracting & Recruitment Pty Ltd. “Google has offered them in the past — most frequently to English users — but their recent test results have indicated that there is a demand for this type of refinement and that the latest search refinement sections will enhance the search experience for Google users.”

“They found that people frequently turn to using search refinements when they don’t find what they want in the top 10 results, said Mills. “And the improved search refinements resulted in an increase in the number of people finding the information they were looking for.”

The new technology produces search refinements for “most searches” and in all 37 languages supported by Google.

Although they currently appear in a separate section on the search results page, Allon indicated that Google was investigating the possibility of blending the information directly into the search results themselves.

The technology was designed specifically to generate more accurate results from long, complicated queries; although, according to Allon, it works very well on simple queries too.

As an example of the difference made by the new technology, a search was conducted using the complex query: “revolutionary technological developments in history".

Applying the new technology, this search resulted in a variety of other suggested searches appearing at the bottom of the page. Among them were searches relating to the American Revolution and the agricultural revolution — neither of which appeared in the top 10 natural search results.

Among Google’s contenders in the search arena Wolfram Research has made the most notable progress towards overcoming the difficulties posed by long search queries. It plans to reveal a new search technology, called Wolram Alpha in May that’s specifically designed to handle longer questions.

Google will also include more information in the ‘snippets’ of text that accompany each search result. This will allow users to get a better idea of what the site is about before making the decision to click through.

Tests have revealed that with longer ‘snippets’, there were fewer instances where people clicked through to a site and then had to come back to the search page because they did not find what they were looking for.