Google is having one of the biggest overhauls of their search engine results to date and now plans on giving searchers more than just a “list of links”.

Media reports say that Google will not be replacing the current keyword-search system, which determines the importance of a website based on the relevance, quality of content, how many other sites link to it, and dozens of other measures.

Instead, Google have said they will match search queries with a database containing millions of “entities” – such as people, places and things – which the company has amassed over the past two years.

The idea is that search results will look like “how humans understand the world”, noting that for many searches at the moment “we cross our fingers and hope there’s a web page out there with the answer”.

Google are attempting to stay ahead of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is already able to answer Who? What? Why? and How? questions.

The makeover also means users will have another alternative to sites like Wikipedia which can answer all manner of weird and wonderful queries.

Google has nearly 70% market share in internet search engines and more than 75% of all search advertising revenue.