In a post last week, Eric Enge filled us in on what happened at Google’s invite-only Searchology seminar.

The review gives some great insight and is definitely worth a read but one or two little snippets of info stand out above everything else.

The big one is the bit attributed to Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering:
“20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees in any given day are queries that they have never seen before.
Wow. 20 to 25%. That took a while to sink in. Talk about reinforcing the value of a long tail strategy.”
So something like a quarter of the more than 100 million daily queries on Google are unique. That’s a shocking statistic. Surely that trend needs to be approaching a plateau of some sort? Anyway, it’s surely an eye opener for anyone doing keyword research.
It also shows the importance of writing “natural” copy, rich in semantically related terms. 

The other point of interest was the mention of multi-language integration, which we’d actually predicted in a previous post:
“Google is also looking at Cross Language Information Retrieval. This was not officially announced, but what they plan to do is to accept a user’s query in their natural language, translate it into every other language they have in their data base (12 languages to start), get the best results, translate the web pages with the best results, and present the results back to the user. One key part of how they do this is that they will end up keeping on hand 12 copies of the web, pre-translated into all 12 languages they will support initially.”

Provided the translation technology is good enough, this could be an enormous leap for search technology.

I particularly like the bit about “keeping 12 copies of the web on hand” – I should probably do the same at home, just in case my Internet connection ever goes down. I wonder if it will fit on my USB drive? Might be a handy thing to carry around…