Author Archives: Pandu Nayak

The ABCs of spelling in Google Search

You’d hardly know it from the way Google Search works, but nearly 20 years after introducing our first spell-check system, spelling remains an ongoing challenge of language understanding. Before we can even begin to start looking for relevant results for a search query, we have to know what a user is looking for, spelled correctly. But every day, one out of 10 search queries is misspelled, and new words are constantly being introduced, along with new ways to misspell them. If you’ve ever been guilty of misspelling a search only to get what you were looking for anyway, read on to learn more about the ABCs of spelling in Google Search. 


A is for All about common spelling mistakes

Our spelling mistakes tend to fall into two main categories: conceptual and slip-of-finger mistakes. We make conceptual mistakes when we’re unsure of how to spell something and try to take our best guess. Say you want to look up the meaning of “gobbledygook” and you don’t know exactly how to spell it, which wouldn’t be unusual since it’s both a difficult to spell word and has two commonly accepted spellings, including “gobbledegook.” In this case, we’ll see many best-effort spellings of the word like “garbledygook,” “gobblydegook,” “gobbleygook,” “gobbly gook,” and more.

An animation of a misspelled search for "gobbledygook"

Slip-of-finger spelling errors happen when we know how to spell what we’re looking for, but accidentally mistype it. Most of us have probably experienced this, especially since the rise of the smartphone, but it happens when we’re typing on full-size keyboards, too. This is why we see over 10,000 variations of queries like “YouTube,” all made by the accidental slip of a finger, such as “ytoube,” “7outub,” “yoitubd” and “tourube.”

An animation of a misspelled search for YouTube

B is for Better models to solve for the unknown

Despite how common our mistakes are, many misspelled queries appear only once, making spelling a unique challenge for Search. And regardless of what kind of spelling error was made, our systems find ways to understand what you mean. Previously, to solve for these never-before-seen misspellings, our systems found inspiration in the keyboard design. For example, if you tried to type "u" but made a mistake, our systems learned you were more likely to have typed "y" than "z" because "y" is adjacent to "u" on a standard English language keyboard. Our models applied the general concept to all new misspellings, walking down nearby letter replacements until a popular replacement term was identified. While this may have seemed like an obvious way to solve for slip-of-finger mistakes, this general approach effectively corrected all kinds of spelling errors, including conceptual mistakes. 

Thanks to advancements in deep learning, we now have a better way to understand spelling. Late last year, we announced a new spelling algorithm that uses a deep neural net that better models and learns from less-common and unique spelling mistakes. This advancement enables us to run a model with more than 680 million parameters in under two milliseconds — a very large model that works faster than the flap of a hummingbird’s wings — so people can search uninterrupted by their own spelling errors. 

And how do our systems know what someone is looking for, no matter the type of mistake and if we’ve never seen the misspelling before? This is where context comes into play. Our natural language understanding models look at a search in context, like the relationship that words and letters within the query have to each other. Our systems start by deciphering or trying to understand your entire search query first. From there, we generate the best replacements for the misspelled words in the query based on our overall understanding of what you’re looking for. For example, we can tell from the other words in the query “average home coast” that you’re probably looking for information on “average home cost.” 


C is for Correcting your query — nicely

You might see these spelling technologies pop up in Google Search in different ways. When we’re pretty sure we know what you’re looking for, we may politely ask, “did you mean…” and show the alternative we think you intended to search for. When we’re very confident that we’ve correctly identified your misspelling, we’ll automatically show results for what we think you’re looking for -- but we’ll always let you know and provide a way to get back to your original spelling. And whether you take our suggestion or not, we’re constantly learning and improving our systems based on that feedback to make Search more helpful.

So whether you’re a spelling bee champ or can't quite nail “I before E except after C,” we'll always be working to improve our spelling so you can keep searching. 


Source: Search


Our latest investments in information quality in Search and News

Delivering high-quality results is what has always set Google apart from other search engines, even in our earliest days. Over the years as the product and user experience have evolved, our investments in quality have accelerated. 


We conduct extensive testing to ensure that Search is as helpful as it can be—from the quality of information we deliver, to the overall experience. Since 2017, we’ve done more than 1 million search quality tests, and we now average more than 1,000 tests per day. 


In addition to investing in the overall Search experience, we also focus on providing reliable information for people everywhere. We’ve highlighted our fundamental approach and ongoing investment in this area, but we also wanted to share some of the new improvements we’ve made to continue to deliver high quality information.


In a year when access to reliable information is more critical than ever—from COVID-19 to natural disasters to important moments of civic participation around the world—our longstanding commitment to quality remains at the core of our mission to make the world’s information accessible and useful. 


New insights from our Intelligence Desk

With new things happening around the world every day, the information landscape can change quickly. To understand how our systems are performing when news breaks, we’ve developed an Intelligence Desk, which actively monitors and identifies potential information threats. 


This effort grew out of our Crisis Response team, which for years has done real-time tracking of events around the world, launching SOS Alerts in Search and Maps to help people get vital information quickly. Over the years, we’ve monitored thousands of events and launched hundreds of alerts to help keep people safe.


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Crisis events monitored (green) and SOS Alerts launched (red), 2016 - 2020.

The Intelligence Desk is a global team of analysts monitoring news events 24/7, spanning natural disasters and crises, breaking news moments and the latest developments in ongoing topics like COVID. When events occur, our analysts collect data about how our systems are responding and compile reports about narratives that are emerging, like new claims about COVID treatments. Our product teams use these data sets and reports from the Intelligence Desk to run more robust quality tests and ensure that our systems are working as intended for the wide range of topics people Search for.


Improving our systems for breaking news and crises

As news is developing, the freshest information published to the web isn’t always the most accurate or trustworthy, and people’s need for information can accelerate faster than facts can materialize. 


Over the past few years, we’ve improved our systems to automatically recognize breaking news around crisis moments like natural disasters and ensure we’re returning the most authoritative information available. We’ve also made significant strides in our overall ability to accurately identify breaking news moments, and do so more quickly. We’ve improved our detection time from up to 40 minutes just a few years ago, to now within just a few minutes of news breaking.

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Our improvements in detecting crisis events expands on our work in 2017 to improve the quality of results for topics that might be susceptible to hateful, offensive and misleading information. Those improvements remain fundamental to how we handle low-quality information in Search and News products, and since then, we’ve continuously updated our systems to be able to detect topic areas that may be at risk for misinformation. We’re continuing to train and test our systems to ensure that whatever people are searching for, they can find reliable information.


Providing accurate information from the Knowledge Graph

In Search, features like knowledge panels that display information from the Google Knowledge Graph help you get quick access to the facts from sources across the web. To deliver high-quality information in these features, we’ve deepened our partnerships with government agencies, health organizations and Wikipedia to ensure reliable, accurate information is available, and protect against potential vandalism.


For COVID-19, we worked with health organizations around the world to provide local guidance and information to keep people safe. To respond to emerging information needs, like the surge we saw in people searching for unemployment benefits, we provide easy access to information right from government agencies in the U.S. and other countries. For elections information, we work with non-partisan civic organizations that provide authoritative information about voting methods, candidates, election results and more.


Information in knowledge panels comes from hundreds of sources, and one of the most comprehensive knowledge bases is Wikipedia. Volunteer Wikipedia editors around the world have created robust systems to guard for neutrality and accuracy. They use machine learning tools paired with intricate human oversight to spot and address vandalism. Most vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted within a matter of minutes.
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To complement Wikipedia’s systems, we’ve added additional protections and detection systems to prevent potentially inaccurate information from appearing in knowledge panels. On rare occasions, instances of vandalism on Wikipedia can slip through. Only a small proportion of edits from Wikipedia are potential vandalism, and we’ve improved our systems to now detect 99 percent of those cases. If these issues do appear, we have policies that allow us to take action quickly to address them.


To further support the Wikipedia community, we created the WikiLoop program last year that hosts several editor tools focused on content quality. This includes WikiLoop DoubleCheck, one of a number tools Wikipedia editors and users can use to track changes on a page and flag potential issues. We contribute data from our own detection systems, which members of the community can use to uncover new insights.  


Helpful context from fact checks and Full Coverage

We design Search and News to help you see the full picture, by helping you easily understand the context behind information you might find online. We make it easy to spot fact checks in Search, News and, most recently, Google Images by displaying fact check labels. These fact checks and labels come from publishers that use ClaimReview schemato mark up fact checks they have created. This year to date, people have seen fact checks on Search and News more than 4 billion times, which is more than all of 2019 combined. 


We understand the importance of the fact checking ecosystem in debunking misleading information, which is why we recently donated an additional $6.5 million to help fact checking organizations and nonprofits focus on misinformation about the pandemic.


We also just launched an update using our BERT language understanding models to improve the matching between news stories and available fact checks. These systems can better understand whether a fact check claim is related to the central topic of a story, and surface those fact checks more prominently in Full Coverage—a News feature that provides a complete picture of how a story is reported from a variety of sources. With just a tap, Full Coverage lets you see top headlines from different sources, videos, local news reports, FAQs, social commentary, and a timeline for stories that have played out over time.


Expanded protections for Search features

We have policies for what can appear in Search features like featured snippets, lists or  video previews that uniquely highlight information on the search results page. One notable example is Autocomplete, which helps you complete your search more quickly.


We have long-standing policies to protect against hateful and inappropriate predictions from appearing in Autocomplete. We design our systems to approximate those policies automatically, and have improved our automated systems to not show predictions if we detect that the query may not lead to reliable content. These systems are not perfect or precise, so we enforce our policies if predictions slip through.


We expanded our Autocomplete policies related to elections, and we will remove predictions that could be interpreted as claims for or against any candidate or political party. We will also remove predictions that could be interpreted as a claim about participation in the election—like statements about voting methods, requirements, or the status of voting locations—or the integrity or legitimacy of electoral processes, such as the security of the election. What this means in practice is that predictions like “you can vote by phone” as well as “you can't vote by phone,” or a prediction that says “donate to” any party or candidate, should not appear in Autocomplete. Whether or not a prediction appears, you can still search for whatever you’d like and find results. 


Information online is constantly changing—as are the things people search for—so continuing to deliver high-quality information is an area of ongoing investment. We’ve made great strides and built upon successful improvements to our systems, and we’ll continue to look for new ways to make Search and News as reliable and helpful as possible, no matter what you’re looking for.


Source: Search


Understanding searches better than ever before

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the 15 years working on Google Search, it’s that people’s curiosity is endless. We see billions of searches every day, and 15 percent of those queries are ones we haven’t seen before--so we’ve built ways to return results for queries we can’t anticipate.

When people like you or I come to Search, we aren’t always quite sure about the best way to formulate a query. We might not know the right words to use, or how to spell something, because often times, we come to Search looking to learn--we don’t necessarily have the knowledge to begin with. 

At its core, Search is about understanding language. It’s our job to figure out what you’re searching for and surface helpful information from the web, no matter how you spell or combine the words in your query. While we’ve continued to improve our language understanding capabilities over the years, we sometimes still don’t quite get it right, particularly with complex or conversational queries. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why people often use “keyword-ese,” typing strings of words that they think we’ll understand, but aren’t actually how they’d naturally ask a question. 

With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding--made possible by machine learning--we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search. 

Applying BERT models to Search
Last year, we introduced and open-sourced a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or as we call it--BERT, for short. This technology enables anyone to train their own state-of-the-art question answering system. 

This breakthrough was the result of Google research on transformers: models that process words in relation to all the other words in a sentence, rather than one-by-one in order. BERT models can therefore consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it—particularly useful for understanding the intent behind search queries.

But it’s not just advancements in software that can make this possible: we needed new hardware too. Some of the models we can build with BERT are so complex that they push the limits of what we can do using traditional hardware, so for the first time we’re using the latest Cloud TPUsto serve search results and get you more relevant information quickly. 

Cracking your queries
So that’s a lot of technical details, but what does it all mean for you? Well, by applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job  helping you find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.

To launch these improvements, we did a lot of testing to ensure that the changes actually are more helpful. Here are some of the examples that showed up our evaluation process that demonstrate BERT’s ability to understand the intent behind your search.

Here’s a search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa.” The word “to” and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important to understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian traveling to the U.S., and not the other way around. Previously, our algorithms wouldn't understand the importance of this connection, and we returned results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Search is able to grasp this nuance and know that the very common word “to” actually matters a lot here, and we can provide a much more relevant result for this query.

BERT in Search: Visa Example

Let’s look at another query: “do estheticians stand a lot at work.” Previously, our systems were taking an approach of matching keywords, matching the term “stand-alone” in the result with the word “stand” in the query. But that isn’t the right use of the word “stand” in context. Our BERT models, on the other hand, understand that “stand” is related to the concept of the physical demands of a job, and displays a more useful response.

BERT in Search: Esthetician Example

Here are some other examples where BERT has helped us grasp the subtle nuances of language that computers don’t quite understand the way humans do.

  • BERT in Search: Pharmacy Example

    With the BERT model, we can better understand that “for someone” is an important part of this query, whereas previously we missed the meaning, with general results about filling prescriptions.

  • BERT in Search: Parking Example

    In the past, a query like this would confuse our systems--we placed too much importance on the word “curb” and ignored the word “no”, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately responding to this query. So we’d return results for parking on a hill with a curb!

  • BERT in Search: Book Example

    While the previous results page included a book in the “Young Adult” category, BERT can better understand that “adult” is being matched out of context, and pick out a more helpful result.

Improving Search in more languages
We’re also applying BERT to make Search better for people across the world. A powerful characteristic of these systems is that they can take learnings from one language and apply them to others. So we can take models that learn from improvements in English (a language where the vast majority of web content exists) and apply them to other languages. This helps us better return relevant results in the many languages that Search is offered in.

For featured snippets, we’re using a BERT model to improve featured snippets in the two dozen countries where this feature is available, and seeing significant improvements in languages like Korean, Hindi and Portuguese.

Search is not a solved problem
No matter what you’re looking for, or what language you speak, we hope you’re able to let go of some of your keyword-ese and search in a way that feels natural for you. But you’ll still stump Google from time to time. Even with BERT, we don’t always get it right. If you search for “what state is south of Nebraska,” BERT’s best guess is a community called “South Nebraska.” (If you've got a feeling it's not in Kansas, you're right.)

Language understanding remains an ongoing challenge, and it keeps us motivated to continue to improve Search. We’re always getting better and working to find the meaning in-- and most helpful information for-- every query you send our way.