Posted on Thursday, March 15 2012 @ 20:43 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
WSJ
reports Google is going to make one of the biggest changes to its search engine in the company's history, by incorporating semantic search, a technology that tries to understand the actual meaning of words. The technology should make it easier to find what you're looking for, and opens up new advertising possibilities for Google.
Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of "entities"—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).
Google search will look more like "how humans understand the world," Mr. Singhal said, noting that for many searches today, "we cross our fingers and hope there's a Web page out there with the answer." Some major changes will show up in the coming months, people familiar with the initiative said, but Mr. Singhal said Google is undergoing a years-long process to enter the "next generation of search."
Under the shift, people who search for "Lake Tahoe" will see key "attributes" that the search engine knows about the lake, such as its location, altitude, average temperature or salt content. In contrast, those who search for "Lake Tahoe" today would get only links to the lake's visitor bureau website, its dedicated page on Wikipedia.com, and a link to a relevant map.
For a more complex question such as, "What are the 10 largest lakes in California?" Google might provide the answer instead of just links to other sites.
