Last week, Google acquired destination specialist company ‘Frommers’. In May 2012, Google launched the Knowledge Graph that has received great positive feedback. The graph encompasses more than 500 million objects and more than 3.5 billion facts and about relationships between these objects. With Knowledge Graph as the base, Google has made three solid changes to its Search. Clearly, Google is on a roll with respect to  travel industry. The nice tweaks they make to their products are always a welcome gift for users. All three changes have direct (positive) impact for travellers. Yes, there is a negative impact for a small sector of travel companies, we will discuss that later in the article. Here are the three changes that Google made in its Search product:

1. Super intelligent recommendation & Enhanced visual search result

a) Larry Page defines a search engine as “understanding exactly what you mean and giving you back exactly what you want”. This is what Google is trying hard to achieve. Now, Google has associated context and semantic to the search queries. With the help of Knowledge Graph, Google will now be able to understand a search term “rio” as three different items – it can be the city in Brazil, it can be an animation movie, or it can also be the casino in Vegas. Refer screenshot below.

b) Google believes that most of the times, a search query results in a list of items to be displayed. So, they have gone ahead and built 1000+ list of items that users can search for. Now, if you search for “Things to do in Chicago”, you would notice a list of places that you should visit in a thumbnail as seen in screenshot below. This is a lovely feature for a traveller. But, on the other side, travel websites that have “Things To Do” as a major feature will see a drop in traffic. You can also search for terms like - Places to see in Dubai, Museums in New York, Bridges in Spain.

2. GMail items in Google Search & Flight schedule search in GMail

a) Now, if you search in Google, you will also notice your GMail items getting listed in search result. So, if you are searching for “Hotels in Chicago” in Google, the result result will also have your GMail items that has any match to “Hotels in Chicago”.

Note: Above two feature are getting rolled out on trial basis to few users, Sign Up to use this feature.

3. Enhanced Google Voice Search

With the power of Google’s voice search platform and the intelligence of knowledge graph, now users will be able to talk to Google Search and get accurate search results. Watch the video to know more.

Author: Karthick Prabu