Web giant Google has unveiled new products that it says will push search in a new direction.

网络巨头谷歌发布新产品，称将会把搜索推向一个新方向。

Google says users are becoming more sophisticated at search

Google is using so-called semantic web（语义万维网） technology to leverage¹（杠杆作用） the underlying² data on websites to enhance results.

"The race in search is far from over and innovation and continued improvement is absolutely pivotal（中枢的，关键的）," said Google's Marissa Mayer.

Google said it could not afford to rest on its laurels³（荣誉） in the quest to build the perfect search engine.

Google has over 63% of the US market compared with rival Yahoo, on 20%.

"I've said this many times but search is still in its infancy⁴. Our engineers are worried about what is the next big thing in search and how are they going to find it," said Ms Mayer, who is the vice-president of search products and user experience.

She said that last year Google had released more than 360 products and in the first quarter of this year it had been 120. Ms Mayer added that this was proof that "Google gets better all the time".

Google has in the past said that despite its lead in the marketplace, users were "one click away" from switching to other alternatives.

Vanessa Fox of SearchEngineLand told the BBC that Google's ability to constantly innovate⁵ gave them a leading edge.

"Google is saying: 'We have to provide for all searchers and do things at scale.' It means they have to launch all sorts of features while some companies can concentrate on just one thing. The key thing behind why they are still ahead is because they are able to innovate at such a pace," said Ms Fox.

Rich snippets（小片）

During the Searchology（搜索学） event at Google's Mountain View headquarters, Ms Mayer and her team showcased four new products that she said would give users a "different way to look at the web".

Rich Snippets are search results that return more information in every listing.

For example, users looking for reviews of a new restaurant might get a "rich snippet" of average review scores, number of reviews and the restaurant's price range.

"This is a step toward making the whole internet smarter," said Google product manager Kavi Goel.

Rich snippets use the metadata（元数据） from web pages, such as address information, calendar information and semantic web mark-up specifications⁶, called Resource Description Frameworks.

The use of these so-called microformats allows the search engine to better understand the meaning of data and to employ it more intelligently.

Google can understand the relationship between different sets of data, and so can pull the correct address listing of a shop without that information having to be specifically tied together.

Google Squared is still experimental and far from perfect, says the company

Google Squared

One of the more experimental products was called Google Squared（迎战）, which will go public in the next month or so. It takes information from the web and displays it in a spreadsheet in "split seconds", something Ms Mayer said would normally take someone half a day to do.

During the demonstration⁷, a query⁸（疑问，质问） for "small dog" was typed into the search box. Seconds later a table popped up showing photographs of various dogs, their origin, weight and height in a clear and simple layout.

While Ms Mayer described this product as "transformative", she would only hint at the specific techniques that Google uses to drive this feature.

"I think we can open the kimono（和服） a little bit without talking about the computer science behind it.

"What they are basically doing is looking for structures on the web that seem to imply facts. Like something 'is' something.

"Different tables, different structures, and then corroborating¹⁰（使坚固，确证） the evidence around whether or not something is a fact by looking at whether that fact occurs across pages.

"This is all in the secret sauce of what we are doing and it takes an incredible amount of compute⁹ power to create those squares," said Ms Mayer.