Sometimes, as odd as it might seem, the answer to the question we’ve asked just doesn’t have its own dedicated page on the Internet. These are the searches that are too specific for Wikipedia pages or, perhaps, too personalized to warrant one single answer.
In these cases, when talking to someone with actual experience in the matter can prove incredibly useful, traditional search engines might normally falter, attempting to offer various avenues that may or may not lead to the personalized answer we’re looking for.
Fortunately for us, Google updated its engine last night in an attempt to address this precise issue, by adding search of forum posts to its search method. By providing results that lead to multiple discussions on the Internet, Google hopes to add a more human aspect to the search results it returns.
In its announcement concerning the upgrade, Google says the changes will mostly affect Web sites that have large volumes of discussions (related to your search) already taking place on the site. Google will now present those discussions as results in a tier below the overarching site hosting the conversation threads.
Google presents getting from rome to florence as a possible search of the type that could benefit from user input on forums.
With rising tensions between the social media monoliths, Facebook and Twitter, this update could be seen as an effort on Google’s part to improve upon its own structure by increasing human-to-human interaction. Whether this is true or not, it’s clear that the search giant wants to maintain its dominance over the other searches, most importantly Bing.
“We hope this feature gives you a deeper view into the relevant content available on sites throughout the web — even when that content spans multiple pages or discussions,” says Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management at Google. “At the same time, the main search results are diverse as always — so if you can’t pinpoint a useful comment there’s a list of relevant sites there to help.”
