Google has been working on a way to make searching the internet better. They’re using something called “end-to-end query term weighting.” This fancy term means they want to figure out how important each word in a search is without needing to do it manually.
Imagine you’re trying to build a super-smart search engine, like Google. It’s already tough because people’s preferences change, technology keeps getting better, and other search engines are trying to be just as good.
Now, picture this: you also have people trying to trick your search engine to get their websites to show up more. That makes it even harder!
Plus, the tools you need to make your search engine better can be costly and have their own problems.
But Google has a plan. They’re exploring a new way to make their search engine smarter. It’s like giving it a brain upgrade. They call it “end-to-end query term weighting.”
This means they want to let the search engine itself decide how important each word in a search is. In the past, they had to set these importance levels manually, but now they want the computer to do it.
Here’s how it works: When you search for something, like “nike running shoes,” Google’s computer program (they call it “BERT”) figures out how important each word in the search is. It’s like BERT is teaching itself to get better at this job.
This way, Google’s search engine can keep improving because it can learn from its mistakes. It’s kind of like if you had a robot friend who got better at making you happy each time you talked to it.
They use something called a “loss function” to measure how well the computer is doing. If it’s not doing well, the computer tries different things until it gets better.
Another cool thing is that Google isn’t just looking at whole words. They’re also looking at groups of words, like “nike running shoes,” and figuring out how important they are.
This is important because if they only looked at individual words, sometimes the search results wouldn’t make sense. For example, if they only looked at “nike” and “running” and “shoes,” you might get results about “nike running socks” instead of the shoes you were looking for.
So, they’re using these groups of words, called “ngrams,” to make their search engine even smarter.
The best part is, this new system is pretty flexible and can work with different types of searches, like looking for information about COVID or finding educational stuff.
And the good news for us is that it should make our searches on Google better and more accurate. So, when you look for something, you’ll get the right results more often. That’s pretty cool for all of us!