Google plans major revamp for search engine

The Web giant has been working on the "next generation of search" over the last couple of years and now it's ready to start rolling it out.
Google is about to embark on its biggest renovation in history. In order to keep up with increased competition and new technology, the Web giant is working to keep ahead of the pack by completely revamping its search function, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Google search executive Amit Singhal told The Wall Street Journal that the new Google search will look more like "how humans understand the world."

Changes are expected to roll out over the next few months, the Journal reports, but the full makeover to "next generation of search" will likely take years. A Google spokesperson told CNET that there is not a specific timeline and the company's philosophy is to launch things when they're ready.

The plan for the revamp isn't necessarily to swap out the current keyword-search system but rather to provide more relevant results. This process will work by using technology called "semantic search." With semantic searches, people's searches will be better matched with "entities"--or people, places and things--which the company has been building over the past two years, reports the Journal.

For example, the Journal reports that people who search for "Lake Tahoe" today get links to the lake's visitor bureau website and a map; whereas with the makeover, they will see key "attributes" about the lake, including location, altitude, average temperature and salt content.

ntel's journey in to cloud computing

With increasing number of headcounts and ever growing demand for IT and computing resources, Intel had no other choice but to consolidate its internal IT requirements that would help addressing annual IT budgets as well as overall operational costs.

It was back in 2009 that Intel took a very significant step of moving towards cloud computing and reap its benefits in coming years. “In 2009, we started to work on cloud strategy and initiated the use of public cloud for non-core business needs such as e-mail applications through software-as-a-service model,” said Kimberly S Stevenson, Intel Corporation's vice president - IT and general manager - IT Global Operations and Services.

While, Intel used public cloud for non-core business needs, it framed an internal cloud strategy, also know as private cloud. Under the acronym DOMES (Design, Office, Manufacturing, Enterprise, Services), which stands for various organizational departments and functions, Intel slowly started to deploy virtualization within these units.

During the first year, Intel virtualized around 12 per cent environment within the organization with the focus on federated clouds. By 2011, the company virtualized over 62 per cent of its environment that led to semi-automated server provisioning and resource allocations based the on-demand self servicing model.

“Our aim is 75 per cent virtualization by 2012, which will allow fully automated server provisioning and resource allocations along with 80 per cent effective asset utilization rate with zero business impact,” Stevenson opined.

Though working on federated cloud throws key challenges such as security and business model, Stevenson stressed on the business benefits it offered to Intel. “It helped in improving the velocity and availability of IT services, provisioning servers in short time, flexible configurations, secured infrastructure and saving cost to the business.”

Intel claimed that it saved net $9 million through internal cloud efforts. According to Stevenson, during 2008, Intel allocated about 3.8 per cent of its total revenues on IT spends. However, due to the cloud strategy they were able to bring it down to 2.5- 3 per cent in recent years.

Intel's internal cloud profile include over 40 per cent for production work load, 22 per cent for human resource, finance and legal, 13 per cent for enterprise resource planning, five per cent for engineering and 19 per cent for sales and marketing.

For Stevenson, the cloud journey was a tough one as she and her team had to make business case of the proposed cloud strategy, present it to the board and get it approved. However, moving forward to future she said, “We learned many things on our cloud journey – right from cloud technology, leadership support, IT business partnership to short term priorities.”