Now Google Knows Things Better !

I was going through this in one of the tech blogs and found it amazing to read and thought it would be good to share in here in my own way as Google launched Smart Search for Places.

Specifically, Google knows 50 million places, and when you search for say “cafe coffee day hyderabad” it now shows you a new kind of search result that replaces a list of links with a list of mini-pages for cafe coffee day in the Big Apple with a map on the right. Each mini-page has links to reviews around the web on sites like Citisearch and Yelp, as well as the address and phone number. The mini-profile also has a photo and a algorithmically chosen snippet from a typical review.

More ambiguous queries such as “soccer field” will use the main search, since the user could be trying to learn the official FIFA regulations for a soccer field, not find one to scrimmage on. But Place Search remains an option for all searches, joining the left navigation on Google’s search results, alongside Images, Shopping, News and Video.

The feature is yet another step by the net’s major search engines to use the interface to improve search, rather than tweaking the ranking algorithms or building a bigger index. Bing and Yahoo are already making moves to build pages for “entities.” See, for instance, what Yahoo does for musical artists and Bing creates for entities such as colleges.