Google App for Android and iOS Now Understands More Complex Queries

Google has announced that it is updating its Search app (aka Google app) on Android and iOS platforms to add more capabilities. The app, Google says, has gotten better at natural language recognition, and can now understand more complex queries.

The company says that Google app is now able to handle superlatives, ordered items, and dates, as well as some complex combinations. It can understand the "meaning" of what a user is asking, it says. Google does so by breaking down a query to understand the semantics of each part separately and piecing together different parts to figure out the overall intent. The advancements will also benefit Knowledge Graph to get more powerful and accurate.

On a blog post, the company explained how the app works. For example, let's say the question is "Who was the US President when the Angels won the World series?" The question is divided into four parts and the algorithm gleans the following relevant details: list of presidents, a country, a baseball team, and world series winners by year. The company then combines these pieces of information to get the whole picture.

"We're still growing and learning, which means we make mistakes. Ask Google "Who was Dakota Johnson's mom in the movie?", and we'll respond with the movies of Dakota Johnson's real-life mother Melanie Griffith, not the actor Jennifer Ehle who played Anastasia's mother Carla in the 50 Shades of Grey movie." wrote Satyajeet Salgar, Product Manager at Google in a blog post.

The idea is to further improve the understanding ability of Google app to a point where a user no longer has to think about feeding the appropriate keywords.