Curious about Semantic Search the SEO Way?
November 12, 2019
DarkCyber is frequently curious about search: Semantic, enterprise, meta, multi-lingual, Boolean, and the laundry list of buzzwords marshaled to allow a person to find an answer.
If you want to get a Zithromax Z-PAK of semantic search talk, navigate to ‘Semantic Search Guide.” One has to look closely at the url to discern that this “objective” write up is about search engine optimization or SEO. DarkCyber affectionately describes SEO as the “relevance” killer, but that’s just our old-fashioned self refusing to adapt to the whizzy new world.
The link will point to a page with a number of links. These include:
- Target audience and contributions
- The knowledge graph explained
- The evolution of search
- Using Google’s entity search tool
- Getting a Wikipedia listing
DarkCyber took a look at the “Evolution of Search” segment. We found it quirky but interesting. For example, we noted this passage:
Now we turn to the heart of full-text search. SEOs tend to dwell on the indexing part of search or the retrieval part of the search, called the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs, for short). I believe they do this because they can see these parts of the search. They can tell if their pages have been crawled, or if they appear. What they tend to ignore is the black box in the middle. The part where a search engine takes all those gazillion words and puts them in an index in a way that allows for instant retrieval. At the same time, they are able to blend text results with videos, images and other types of data in a process known as “Universal Search”. This is the heart of the matter and whilst this book will not attempt to cover all of this complex subject, we will go into a number of the algorithms that search engines use. I hope these explanations of sometimes complex, but mostly iterative algorithms appeal to the marketer inside you and do not challenge your maths skills too much. If you would like to take these ideas in in video form, I highly recommend a video by Peter Norvig from Google in 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs
Oh, well. This is one way to look at universal search. But Google has silos of indexes. The system after 20 plus years does not federate results across indexes. Semantic search? Yeah, right. Search each index, scan results, cut and paste, and then try to figure out the dates and times. Semantic search does not do time particularly well.
Important. Not to the SEO. Search babble may be more compelling.
If this approach is your cup of tea, inLinks has the hot water you need to understand why finding information is not what it seems.
Stephen E Arnold, November 12, 2019
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