Instead of simply surfacing a list of ubiquitous blue web links, the all new Google search, will also give more facts and direct answers to queries right at the top of the relevant results page. By using ‘semantic search technology’, it intends to bring about the biggest makeover as yet. The idea on part of the world’s most popular search engine is to stay well ahead of the curve and keep its top spot in the online world.

Knowledgeable and intuitive search

Google obviously is keen to maintain its dominance over traditional search rivals like Microsoft, new entrants including Apple and possibly Facebook. Coming back to basics, Semantic search basically denotes the process of grasping the actual meaning of keywords users type into a search box. That would make the search engine differentiate between the animal ‘jaguar’ and the car brand ‘Jaguar’ on a Web page, which it may ultimately want to offer a link in appropriate search results.

Tackling the reach of social media

Since the rapid rise of social media sites and quick information updates happening in real-time, Google has felt the need to update its search service, so as to make it as timely, quick and relevant to each user. However, in spite of having enjoyed a fruitful partnership with Twitter for a couple of years that let the search engine index and surface tweets in its search results body, it has not succeeded in negotiating the same deal again with the microblogging site. This has left it without updates in the body of its results – beyond the Google News service.

More thorough answers

Google has amassed a vast knowledge encyclopedia about ‘entities’ like people and places to power semantic search. The company is now going to start fusing both its classic keyword search system and semantic search technology. The changes will see more thorough answers, rather than a large display of web links on each of the results page.

This essentially will resemble the approach of Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that attempts to answer user queries, rather than supplying a long list of sites. Google seems to pushing towards the same methodology and may soon start offering one answer to a query, instead of countless links to different websites.

However worrying the prospect of a search engine knowing what a user ‘wants to know even before they do so’ may appear, Google makes a strong case for the transformative experience that it will ultimately offer. The changes over the next few months are not going to have an impact on its keyword search system, but will result in blending of the same with the semantic search technology.

It’s bound to affect the millions of sites that rely upon current page-ranking results of Google. What intuitive, semantic search actually means is that the businesses will need to think harder to make their digital offerings more user-driven and sophisticated. Hence they are closely watching one of its major overhauls.