Google said updating search technology

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 15 (UPI) -- Google is working on the most significant overhaul of its search engine technology in the U.S. company's history, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The update will change Google searches so they rely heavily on a technology called "semantic search," using the actual meaning of words, although it will still use keyword-based search, basing the relevance of a site on criteria like the words it uses and how often other sites link to it.

The new search technology will directly affect between 10 percent and 20 percent of queries, which is still billions of searches each month, the Journal reported.

In a recent interview Google search executive Amit Singhal said Google's future search will "better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of entities -- people, places, and things -- which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years."

Future Google searches, he said, will mimic "how humans understand the world."

Currently, he said, for many searches "we cross our fingers and hope there's a Web page out there with the answer."

The update will bring Google into the "next generation of search," Singhal said.