Google: 25% Of Queries Are New & Adding Question Engine

Google’s Udi Manber – Search is a Hard Problem from Read/Write Web has an interesting write up on a presentation that Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering, gave the other day at Supernova. In his presentation, he covered why “search is a hard problem.” But a few of his statements really stood out from the others.

Manber said 20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees today have never seen before. Wow, 25% of the queries people enter into Google today, were not seen before today?

Manber also said that Google is rolling out a new search function that interprets questions better. Manber gave three examples of how Google will be handling this.

(1) “How much does it cost for an exhaust system” will pull up results from “cost of an exhaust system.”
(2) “Overhead view of bellagio pool” will pull up results from “bellagio pool pictures.”
(3) “Fedora 5 losing network connections” will pull up results from “fedora 5 network configuration.”

Postscript From Danny: Google promised this query expansion last month as part of its Searchology event, and Google’s Matt Cutts told me this weekend that it is already live in the service.

Postscript From Barry: That 25% New Queries Figure? Ballpark Estimate, Says Google is the update we just got from Google.