Google adds semantic search

[delta4]

It seems a new big update is coming soon to Google Search. Article at WSJ

Under the shift, people who search for "Lake Tahoe" will see key "attributes" that the search engine knows about the lake, such as its location, altitude, average temperature or salt content. In contrast, those who search for "Lake Tahoe" today would get only links to the lake's visitor bureau website, its dedicated page on Wikipedia.com, and a link to a relevant map.

For a more complex question such as, "What are the 10 largest lakes in California?" Google might provide the answer instead of just links to other sites.

Google also hopes the change to semantic search will entice some people to stay longer on the search site, said people briefed on the plans, amid competition with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter Inc. that are claiming more Internet users' time.

So if you have sites based on facts like lakes, mobile phones or others that can be easily categorized prepare yourself because you can lose a lot of traffic.

[Clinton]

For a more complex question such as, "What are the 10 largest lakes in California?" Google might provide the answer instead of just links to other sites.

The usual theft!

Google doesn't have answers, it steals them.

I just searched for [theft]. I get the complete definition right at the top of the SERPs.

That's not Google's content, it's stolen from here. Further, they have a speaker icon that plays the sound. That sound file is served from gstatic.com, a Google domain that hosts all these stolen sound and image files.

Google will remove a file on request. IF you request it. That doesn't make their use of this content right, moral or even, probably, legal.

Everybody wants to keep users on their sites for longer. We do it by improving our sites, creating more content, creating better content. We don't do it by stealing what belongs to others and serving it directly to our users.

[grynge]

It just goes back to what some of us have been saying all along. The Serps are a hindrance to google as they take users away from google making money from those users. They are more making themselves a portal than a search engine, hopefully we all know what happens to portals.

I must admit whilst their traffic has made me rich, I am glad I started taking some peoples advice and started looking for other forms of traffic. More and more the proof is google don't want to give their users away.