Search wars in full swing. Many believe that both Microsoft and Yahoo are going to upset the Gogglenaut and reduce it to just a naut. Well not so fast. The incumbent search engine has struck back with some major upgrades.

First up, Chris Winfield, search engine expert and president of 10E20 Web Design in an email explains, “But in our “I NEED IT NOW” environment – timing is everything. Microsoft is still at least 6 months away from unveiling the new & improved MSN search engine. Yahoo! is starting to use results from Inktomi signaling that they might be dropping Google results even earlier than expected.”

Chris who writes the “Search Engine Market Insider” points out that Google has increased their search engine crawl by over 1 billion pages. “In my opinion this isn’t even the biggest improvement. They have also updated their algorithms (how they determine who comes up where) and seem to have effectively cut down on a lot of spammers and sites trying to “cheat the system”, he writes.

bq. Google’s search algorithms are focusing much more on stemming (being able to give someone similar, strong results for variants of words.) For example – if you search for “widget” – you now get similar results for “widget”, “widgets”, “widgeter”, etc. On top of this – Google searches are really relying on “semantics” – being able to not only understand what a website is really about and how it relates to search terms but to understand (from a search term) what a user really wants. This is the goal of every search engine and one of the real pinnacles of success and it seem that with this latest update – Google is closer to being able to achieve this.