Google joins crowd, adds semantic search capabilities

IDG News Service - Google Inc. has given its search engine an initial injection of semantic search technology, pushing the market leader into what many observers see as the future of Internet search.

The new technology will enable Google's search engine to identify concepts and associated terms related to queries, thereby improving the list of related search terms that are displayed along with search results, the company said in a blog post today.

For example, Google's search engine, upon encountering a query such as "principles of physics," will now be able to understand that "angular momentum," "special relativity," "big bang" and "quantum mechanics" are all related terms, according to the blog post, which was co-written by two of Google's technical staffers.

Ori Allon, technical leader of Google's search quality team and one of the blog post's authors, said in an interview that the added capabilities involve a dollop of semantic search technology mixed with a large helping of on-the-fly data mining, with a primary goal of helping users to refine their queries so they can find the specific information they're looking for.

"This is a new approach to query refinement because we're finding concepts and entities related to queries while you do a search, so everything is happening in real time and not [pre-assembled]," Allon said.

He added that the company isn't using semantic technology more broadly at this point because full conceptual analysis of documents would slow down the search and query-refinement process. "If we want to get it all done in a matter of milliseconds [using semantic tools only], there's a lot of innovations we still have to do," Allon said. "A full semantic search would be very hard to do in [such a] limited amount of time."

But offering suggestions for refining queries is only the first of what Google officials "hope will be many other applications" of the new technology, Allon said. For example, users eventually should see improvements in areas such as page ranking.

"For simple queries like 'Britney Spears' and 'Barack Obama,' it's pretty easy for us to rank the pages," he said. "But when the query is 'What medication should I take after my eye surgery?' -- that's much harder. We need to understand the meaning."

Google has been criticized for using what is considered an aging approach to processing search queries based primarily on analyzing keywords and not on understanding their meaning.

Over the years, Google executives have acknowledged that semantic technology will be an important component of search engines in the future — while also saying that they see semantic capabilities as a part of the algorithmic mix, not as a full replacement for traditional keyword analysis.