Google is today rolling out a key upgrade to the algorithm powering its search engine which is based on "Australian-made" technology originally developed by a PhD student at the University of New South Wales.



The student was Ori Allon and the search engine process he developed at the university’s Kensington campus in 2005 was called Orion.



In 2006, Google acquired the rights to the Orion technology for an undisclosed sum and whisked Mr Allon, then aged 26, off to the Googleplex - its sprawling headquarters complex in Mountain View, California.



Today, as a senior engineer with Google’s search quality team, he is unveiling the fruits of the hard slog which turned his university project into an integrated component of Google’s omnipotent search infrastructure.



In the world of online search, which is dominated by Google, the holy grail is to respond to a query with speed and relevance - a non-trivial task given the amount of content now clogging up the web.



Google’s new search feature purports to “better understand associations and concepts related to your search”, and therefore to deliver a more meaningful search experience.

This is achieved by integrating a new technology into the Google search infrastructure that enables a better understanding of concepts and associations related to the search query.

All of it pocessed in real time and in any one of 37 different languages.



“For some people it’s going to be a big deal and for some people it’s not. So it’s very subjective,” Mr Allon said in a telephone interview.



“[But] we are very excited. We see many more opportunities for this technology now that it’s integrated into the [Google] system.”



Mr Allon, now a naturalised Australian, was born and raised in Israel and came to Australia in the mid-'90s. After completing his bachelor and masters degrees at Melbourne's Monash University, he moved to UNSW to further his studies and research.



“Whatever I had in the [Australian] university it was very basic,” he said. “Yes, it’s based on the idea but we have made numerous improvements. It wasn’t able to do what it’s doing now - which is to serve millions and millions of users a day.”



And its not just all happening in the background. Google users will see a new row of additional links at the foot of the first search return page under the heading “searches related to”.



“I’m very proud of this and I’m very proud that it’s coming all the way from Australia - all my education is from Australia,” Mr Allon said. And it’s very satisfying to be able to compete with Stanford students, with Yale students, Harvard students and to be able to bring this kind of innovation.”



Mr Allon's PhD supervisor, Dr Eric Martin, a senior lecturer is computer science at UNSW, said that Google's acquisition of the rights to Orion was unusual.



"We have quite a few students who come up with good ideas but making it commercially attractive is not that easy to do,” he said.

