Google show-cased a very cool new mobile search feature last week at the SMX Conference in Paris which demonstrated impressive advances in natural language search.
Google knows a mobile phone users’ exact location and this new enhancement means you can now use natural language queries to ask Google for information about landmarks, buildings and businesses around you without specifying them by name.
For example, “when does this restaurant open?” or “what’s the phone number for this place?”. Even more impressive is you can ask subsequent questions as you would talking to another person and Google understands what you’re asking about. Eg “what’s the name of this church?” “When was it built?” “How high is it?”
See some examples of this in action:
Why should you care?
Enhancements like this make searching on a mobile phone even easier and should mean an increase in spoken searches. Ensuring your business can be found in Google local search will therefore become even more important (see restaurant example above).
Although this appears to use the same natural language engine, this is not “Google Now on Tap” which launches later in the year. This is functionality available now on Android phones and also iPhones that use the Google Search app.
Unfortunately it doesn’t yet appear to be rolled out globally and we’ve not yet been able to get it working here in NZ. Let us know if you do.
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Jeremy and Mark are two of the partners behind SureFire Search. Despite their deceptively youthful appearances, both have worked in search marketing for many years. To put that in context, Google didn't even exist when Jeremy started.
