Semantic Search Becomes Search Engine Optimization: That Is Going to Improve Relevance
March 27, 2015
I read “The Rapid Evolution of Semantic Search.” It must be my age or the fact that it is cold in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, this morning. The write up purports to deliver “an overview of the history of semantic search and what this means for marketers moving forward.” I like that moving forward stuff. It reminds me of Project Runway’s “fashion forward.”
The write up includes a wonky graphic that equates via an arrow Big Data and metadata, volume, smart content, petabytes, data analysis, vast, structured, and framework. Big Data is a cloud with five little arrows pointing down. Does this mean Big Data is pouring from the sky like yesterday’s chilling rain?
The history of the Semantic Web begins in 1998. Let’s see that is 17 years ago. The milestone is in the context of the article, the report “Semantic Web road Map.” I learned that Google was less than a month old. I thought that Google was Backrub and the work on what was named Google begin a couple, maybe three years, earlier. Who cares?
The Big Idea is that the Web is an information space. That sounds good.
Well in 2012, something Big happened. According to the write up Google figured out that 20 percent of its searches were “new.” Aren’t those pesky humans annoying. The article reports:
long tail keywords made up approximately 70 percent of all searches. What this told Google was that users were becoming interested in using their search engine as a tool for answering questions and solving problems, not just looking up facts and finding individual websites. Instead of typing “Los Angeles weather,” people started searching “Los Angeles hourly weather for March 1.” While that’s an extremely simplified explanation, the fact is that Google, Bing, Facebook, and other internet leaders have been working on what Colin Jeavons calls “the silent semantic revolution” for years now. Bing launched Satori, a knowledge storehouse that’s capable of understanding complex relationships between people, things, and entities. Facebook built Knowledge Graph, which reveals additional information about things you search, based on Google’s complex semantic algorithm called Hummingbird.
Yep, a new age dawned. The message in the article is that marketers have a great new opportunity to push their message in front of users. In my book, this is one reason why running a query on any of the ad supported Web search engines returns so much irrelevant information. In my just submitted Information Today column, I report how a query for the phrase “concept searching” returned results littered with a vendor’s marketing hoo-hah.
I did not want information about a vendor. I wanted information about a concept. But, alas, Google knows what I want. I don’t know what I want in the brave new world of search. The article ignores the lack of relevance in results, the dust binning of precision and recall, and the bogus information many search queries generate. Try to find current information about Dark Web onion sites and let me know how helpful the search systems are. In fact, name the top TOR search engines. See how far you get with Bing, Google, and Yandex. (DuckDuckGo and Ixquick seem to be aware of TOS content by the way.)
So semantic in the context of this article boils down to four points:
- Think like an end user. I suppose one should not try to locate an explanation of “concept searching.” I guess Google knows I care about a company with a quite narrow set of technology focused on SharePoint.
- Invest in semantic markup. Okay, that will make sense to the content marketers. What if the system used to generate the content does not support the nifty features of the Semantic Web. OWL, who? RDF what?
- Do social. Okay, that’s useful. Facebook and Twitter are the go to systems for marketing products I assume. Who on Facebook cares about cyber OSINT or GE’s cratering petrochemical business?
- And the keeper, “Don’t forget about standard techniques.” This means search engine optimization. That SEO stuff is designed to make relevance irrelevant. Great idea.
Net net: The write up underscores some of the issues associated with generating buzz for a small business like the ones INC Magazine tries to serve. With write ups like this one about Semantic Search, INC may be confusing their core constituency. Can confused executives close deals and make sense of INC articles? I assume so. I know I cannot.
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2015
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