Google Returns to Larry and Sergey’s Garage for Massive Search Revamp

If you’ve started to feel like Google understands you a little better, the company says that’s because it has quietly rolled out the biggest revamp of its search engine technology in years.

Today, Google’s senior vice president of search, Amit Singhal, announced the overhaul, called Hummingbird, from the garage in Silicon Valley that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin used as the company’s first office. He described Hummingbird as the next leap forward in the search technology that debuted a decade and a half ago. This isn’t a new search interface.

This isn’t something you can see and navigate inside your browser. It’s a new way for Google to determine what you’re looking for — behind the scenes — and send it your way.

According to Singhal, Hummingbird gives Google a much greater ability to understand searches not just as words but as real-world concepts. “As (users) have become more comfortable with search, they have started asking more complex questions of Google,” he said. Hummingbird, he explained, is far more effective on these long, complex questions in part because, as Google’s search engine crawls the web, it’s starting to grasp what documents are actually saying.

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The changes are intended to support an increasingly conversational search engine that anticipates what users want before they ask. Among the small advances that will eventually start showing up in search results are a comparison tool that will, for example, show nutrition information when you search “butter vs olive oil” or planet size when you search “earth vs neptune.”

Google’s Knowledge Graph — a complex database that helps the company’s web services better understand real-world objects and the relationship between them — has also become more sophisticated, according to search vice president Tamar Yehoshua. He demonstrated how a simple search for “impressionist artists” would return a quick art history lesson right on the results page.

Using Google Now, Yehoshua showed how a simple, plainspoken request — “remind me to buy olive oil when I get to Trader Joe’s” — would create a location-specific reminder that the app would push to a mobile device once you’re near the store.

Google is far from the only app-maker to offer geo-aware notifications, though a new Google Now update for iOS should up the competition with Apple’s Reminders app by pushing those notifications straight to the lock screen. And no one can match Google for the seamlessness with which it brings together search, mapping, natural language processing, and voice recognition.

While the press event was ostensibly meant to highlight how far Google still hopes to push its technology, sitting in the original Google garage was mostly a reminder of how far the company — and the internet — has come in 15 years.

Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce, was the home’s former owner, fresh off getting her M.B.A. and in need of a tenant to help out with the mortgage. She said the drab blue carpet on the floor of the garage now was the same carpet she put in as a perk to entice Page and Brin.

She said her come-to-Google moment happened while she was at work (she had a job at Intel) and the search engine went down.

“It was in that moment I realized, I can’t get my work done because I can’t search on Google,” Wojcicki said.

This would sound like so much marketing-speak if it didn’t also apply to so many of the rest of us. How many people who sit in front of computers all day can do their jobs without Google’s search engine? How many can afford to? Whatever else Google now does or means, it’s hard not to be struck by the sheer breadth of the changes — for better and worse — that have rippled out to the rest of the world from an unassuming bungalow where a few guys sat in front of screens, the archetypal Silicon Valley myth reinforced by one of the rare instances where it came true.