Semantic Search: How Far Will This Baloney Tube Stretch?
July 12, 2015
I have seen a number of tweets, messages, and comments about “Semantic Search: the Future of Search Marketing?”
For those looking for traffic, it seems that using the phrase “semantic search” in conjunction with “search marketing” is Grade A click bait. Go for it.
My view is a bit different. I think that the baloney manufactured from semantic search (more correctly the various methods that can be grouped under the word semantic) is low grade baloney.
Search marketing is on a par with the institutional pizza pumped out for freshman in a dorm in DeKalb, Illinois. Yum, tasty. What is it? Oh, I know it is something that is supposed to be nutritious and tasty. The reality is that the pizza isn’t. That’s search marketing. The relevant result may not be. Relevance is jiggling results so that a message is displayed whether the user wants that message or not. Not pizza.
Here’s a passage in the write up I highlighted in pale yellow, the color in my marker set closest to the dorm pizza:
Semantic search is the technology the search engines employ to better understand the context of a search.
Contrast this definition with this one from “Breakthrough Analysis: Two + Nine Types of Semantic Search” published in 2010, five years before the crazy SEO adoption of the buzzword, if not the understanding of what “semantic” embraces:
Semantics (in an IT setting) is meaningful computing: the application of natural language processing (NLP) to support information retrieval, analytics, and data-integration that compass both numerical and “unstructured” information.
The article then trots out these semantic search options:
- Related searches and queries
- Reference results (dictionary look up)
- Annotated results
- Similarity search
- Syntactic annotations
- Concept search
- Ontology based search
- Semantic Web search
- Faceted search
- Clustered search
- Natural language search
Now there are many, many issues with this list. How about differentiating faceted, concept, and clustered search? Give up yet?
The point is that semantic search is not one thing. If one accepts this list as the touchstone, the functions referenced are going to contain other content processing operations.
The problem is that these functions on their own or used in some magical, affordable combination are not likely to deliver what the user wants.
The user wants relevant results which pertain directly to her specific information need.
The search engine optimization and marketing crowd want the results to be what they want to present to a user.
The objectives are different and may not be congruent or even similar.
In short, the notion of taking crazy, generalized concepts and slapping them on marketing is likely to produce howlers like this write up and the equally wonky list from 2010.
The point is that semantic baloney has been in the supermarket for a long time.
Obviously this baloney has a long shelf life.
In the meantime, how is ad supported Web search working for you? Oh, how is that in house information access system working for you?
If you want traffic, buy Adwords. Please, do not deliver to me the six pack of baloney.
Stephen E Arnold, July 12, 2015
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Semantic Search: How Far Will This Baloney Tube Stretch? : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search