Google is getting even smarter about answering your complex questions

Google’s search app is getting better about understanding the core meaning and intent of your questions, the company announced today, as it can now handle superlatives (tallest, largest, etc.) combined with ordered items. Such a thing seems simple to us, but in a blog post, search product manager Satyajeet Salgar underlined how much harder it can prove for computers. But he gave some examples of queries that show off Google’s newfound smarts like, “What are the largest cities in Texas?”

That’s not all; according to Salgar, Google now does “a much better job of understanding questions with dates in them,” letting you ask obscure things like “what was the population of South Dakota in 1988?” And finally, the Google app is more capable of figuring out “complex combinations” that require it to break down multiple parts of a question. An example of that would be “Who was the US president when the Angels won the World Series?” These advancements help the search app “traverse the Knowledge Graph much more reliably to find the right facts and compose a useful answer,” which Google then builds upon.