On Semantics.

From Keywords to Semantic Search: How Google Changed Content

From those days when ‘literature’ used to mean a great deal to human lives, writers were thought to be the very source and course of all creativity induced; until it all got flung wayward, of course, by those profit rendering bosses who were never tired of bundling ‘keywords’. Although to take away some of their blame, content stuffed with keywords ‘did help’. A site could soar towards the top spot on Google rankings because of it, which was the whole point of everything anyways.

Writers turned into ‘keyword’ producing robots for this reason, and what’s been deemed as ‘good content’ is preferably more crawlable than readable since then. Well, Google had to notice it sooner or later, thus introducing ‘semantic search’ to bridge the gap between what is crawlable by the bots and what is readable to the human eye and mind. Semantic search focuses on the ‘intent’ of the searcher, and ‘context’ in which the query has been made.

Knowledge Graph

Through ‘semantic search’, Google has evolved from stemming and stringing ‘words’ (extending list of synonyms) to what is now called the ‘knowledge graph’. Knowledge-graph is a ‘knowledge base’ used by Google so that they can present users with all relevant information to the query themselves. This helps the user get the information up front without having to go to different sites and gather information themselves.

For example, a user wants to know/search/research about who “Barack Obama” is. All they need to type in is “Obama” and Google will gather all relevant information about Barack Obama and return it to the user.

What Semantic Means

The word ‘semantic’ by definition means the science of meaning in language. Language is full of ambiguous words that seldom mean more than one thing in different contexts. With ‘semantic search’, Google has the ability to learn in what context a certain word has been put into the search engine by the user.

For example, when the user’s query text includes the word ‘apple’, semantic search relates the word ‘apple’ with other words in the text to identify its relevancy to the user’s query. A user could type in ‘apple tree’ or ‘apple building’ — one could refer to the fruit and tree, another to an official avenue of the Apple company.

Example 1

Example 2

What This Means for Tomorrow

It is certainly going to change the user’s way of making queries in a big way. Following that, content will have to become more interactive, clean, and semantically compelling. All in all, it means a better experience for users. For writers, PageRank will no longer be the only (or one of the most influential) component deciding how successful a piece of content is. There will be a certain air of freedom on their account, which will, quite affirmatively, lead to the highest quality of content for users to consume.