Google making it easier to find search results on women’s sports
- Queries for non-gender specific information now more inclusive
- The improvements come in time for the FIFA Women's World Cup
- Google has expanded coverage to include over 380 leagues
(NewsNation) — Google is retooling its search engine to make it easier for users to find results about women’s sports.
The improvements come in time for the FIFA Women’s World Cup, which began Thursday. The U.S. Women’s National Team is vying for it’s fifth consecutive title and faces the Netherlands on Wednesday.
Google has expanded coverage of women’s sports in information boxes at the top of the results page to include more than 380 leagues, the company said in a blog post Tuesday. In the last year alone, Google added 110 leagues across women’s soccer, rugby and cricket.
The search results page will now also give users easy access to live streams and highlights from leagues including the WNBA and Women’s Premier League.
Google is also improving its understanding of search queries to show women’s leagues when a user searches ambiguous terms, such as “Germany national soccer team,” without specifying men’s or women’s.
“We have and are continuing to roll out updates to make the features we surface for gender ambiguous queries more inclusive, for example making it easier to switch back and forth between men’s and women’s results for sports tournaments,” Google said in the blog post.
Improvements have also been made for people searching in gendered languages such as Spanish, German and Hindi. For example, a query for “jugadoras de béisbol,” the feminine of baseball players in Spanish, will now give more gender-correct responses, the company said.
Google Search will also take into account increasing searches about current and trending tournaments and events.
During the 2019 Women’s World Cup, Google says it saw the largest spike in search interest related to women’s soccer in Google Trends history. During this year’s event, the search page will contain key information and video highlights from matches, as well as a multiplayer online game.