Google dominates the online search market, with a global share of about 70 percent. Its search engine is followed at a great distance by Bing search engine from Microsoft. But the way people search on the Internet is changing, and Google needs to adapt in order to maintain its dominance. The company now competes on a new segment called latent search with Facebook and Apple.
Generally people get the best results on Google Search when they write in the search box the words in the order of their importance. Google, Facebook and Apple now develop tools that allow us to look for words the way we speak. This type of search is called “abstract,” “latent” or “conversational.” For example, the user would ask a search engine “Where is the best restaurant for dinner” and gets back the relevant results.
An expert in search engines, Larry Kim, told Business Insider that now people use when searching Google what he calls “the language of the cave man.” Often search words have no meaning. For example, to see pictures of Scarlett Johansson on the beach, the user would type in “Scarlett Johansson pictures beach.”
Facebook is advancing its latent search with the Graph Search, a service recently launched. If someone enters one word in this Facebook search engine, results are usually irrelevant. But if you ask “movies my friends like,” the results are amazing.
With its new algorithm “Hummingbird,” which is still in the process of implementing worldwide, Google Search can do a latent search. The search engine can be asked, ” How to make a knot for a tie,” the results are pretty good.
Apple does not let this opportunity slip and improves its latent search for the digital voice assistant Siri. The company knows that the future belongs to mobile devices and it is easier to give voice commands on these devices than typing.
Siri is currently using Bing for search. Microsoft has also a deal with Facebook to use Bing as search engine.
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