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Sunday, January 24, 2010

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Google search gets better with highlighting of synonyms

Posted: 23 Jan 2010 08:47 PM PST

Google has recently commented on its new search engine tweak which is to show synonyms in bold with keywords. This means if you search for a word which has a synonym, it will search for results with both keywords. A synonym is something that essentially has two differnet words with similar meaning. For example movie tickets and film tickets can mean the same thing.

Most search engines did not bother with synonyms as it was a little tricky. Here I give you the example of the words Film and Movie which might mean the same. But sometimes the context of a sentence can cease to make these words synonyms. For instance if you are searching for x-ray film then the search engine searching for the keyword ‘movie’ is quite useless.

This what Google has changed to its search engine. It has got its search engine to understand the context of the words and their synonyms and then give results.

Google Search for keywords Film Tickets

google_synonyms_keywords1

You can see that the results that are highlited are both Film and Movies when movie was never entered.

Google Search for keywords X-ray Film

You can see that the results highlighted are only about keywords X-ray film. No movie keyword around at all.

Why is this a good thing?

A lot of words people use in one country might not be used as often in another. For instance in India we say ‘I am going to see a film’ but in the US ideally the sentence would be ‘I am going to see a movie’. This means someone from India is more prone to enter search results for ‘film’ rather than ‘movie’. This ability of Google search to highlight words with similar means within the context makes it easier to give us relevant results. Also for bloggers like us its good news that our websites wont have to contain the specific keywords for showing up on search engines. This probably means good news for good content and bad news for people looking to trick search engines.

If you come across more examples of synonyms showing up on Google search do let me know through your comments.