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Semantic Search and the Future of Search Engines
Read more“Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow,” -Aesop
According to Wikipedia “Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used by humans to express themselves through language.” As our entire business is based on language, this is something us search engine folks should be interested in. The search engines certainly are.
Google’s first attempt at utilizing the semantics of keywords and terms in their algorithm came in March of 2009, when they announced that they were going to be using new technology which would allow them to make associations and correlations between words. Bing made a similar attempt at adding semantics by acquiring Powerset which was supposed to add semantic capabilities to their search engine as well.
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SocialRank is the New PageRank – Here’s How it Works
Read moreThe Late 90’s:Back in the late 90’s, when search engines like Excite, Altavista, Hotbot and Lycos ruled the world, search results were determined only by relevancy.The more keywords on your page that matched the query, the higher your page would rank.Then Google flipped the search world upside down with its notion of PageRank. The link based popularity metric that introduced the concept of authority + relevancy as its ranking mode.PageRank Rules the Day:Google was 100% right in thinking that authority, or credibility, should be a ranking factor, the problem was that Google had no way of telling how authoritative the author of the page really was. In fact, in most cases they couldn’t even tell “Who” the author of the page was. The best they could do was to look at what other domains linked to them and from that try to calculate a popularity score – PageRank.
