Sunday 25 March 2012

Semantic Search: A Brief Account



Is Semantic Search the next generation search platform? Time is the great master to tell it. If web is to match with the next generation expectations, there needs to be concise way for users to find information and to search the web online. Semantic search stands to probably reach out to such futuristic parameters.

In a word, semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy, with focus on context of search, intent, location, variation of entries, and queries in order to deliver relevant and precise search results. Semantic search, in fact, is the ability of a search engine to determine what you actually mean when you look for something and bring in the search results that do not necessarily match with the entries or words you have entered into the query box. Capacity to understand the content of the web pages is the prime feature of semantic web concept.

Search Engines of Present Days:

Search engines are too much keyword phrase dependent to figure out what a web page is saying all about. For instance, this piece of writing has the word 'semantic', which has been repeated multiple times and the phrase 'semantic search' popping up a number of times in its body. While search engines like Google, etc. see this, it starts guessing that this writing-piece is all about semantic search.

This search process is no doubt working satisfactorily. But sometimes, this search way fetches some rather strange search results. More or less, all of us have come across rather embarrassing search results while looking for something specific. Semantic search engines aim to teach the computer to make out the nuances of search entries and to understand what is on the web page so as to find the better or most relevant search results.

So in semantic search, the aim is fixed to search for what searchers really mean by the entered keyword phrase, and find words and concepts that are verily associated with the searchers' keyword phrase. For example, when searchers search for a phrase containing 'web-design ', what are they actually looking for? Is it computer, or movie, or website design?

A Web 3.0 Concept?

People have started to believe that Web 3.0 will be the semantic web search. When Web 1.0 was about using 'Web as a tool' and when Web 2.0 is about 'integrating the web-users into the Web', the Web 3.0 appears to come to help the Web to better understand the web-users. If people are thinking of semantic web search in this way, they are not logically wrong.

This aims to primarily become better search engine. With its full-use, web browsers and search engines are expected to become able to answer simple queries by mining the web for the answers. Major search engines have already started to use some elements of semantic search.

Impacts of Semantic Web Search on SEO:

A lot of SEO techniques have changed drastically in the recent times in the backdrop of Google Panda roll-out. One thing has, however, remained fairly unabated all the same amid a wave of changes. SEO world is still primarily driven by keyword phrases. Use of keywords in URL structure, meta tagging, links, contents, and in everything of the search engine optimization world is seen. So, keywords are ubiquitous in the SEO field, regardless of the ways taken by SEO experts to slice it. With Panda updates, it was apprehended that there might come a new surge which could tweak and throw all wrong SEO practices.

Anyway, keywords are still relatively prime factor in the SEO practice. Semantic web search seems to add a whole new element to this world, and that is the human element. With its advent, SEO professionals are required to figure out the actual meaning of the keyword they are using and to create content accordingly and specifically. So, outlook to the keyword application for the SEO purposes needs to be changed to live up to the parameters of the semantic search engines. At the same time, keyword relevancy, not semantics, will always be of first consideration for all search engines. Only approach to it is going to change.


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