Google Florida Update
Google Florida Update
November 16, 2003 will be a date to remember in search engine history. It will be remembered as the day that Google raised the bar on search engines. It is the day that they changed the rules as far as ranking pages and returning search results. As people will learn, in the days and weeks to come, it was also the day that Google introduced a new term to the SEO handbook: Ontology.
Ontology is “an explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them.” In other words, Ontology is a means whereby words are combined to give meaning to a body of text. No longer are the word combinations important. What is important, however, are what the combinations say about the text. It’s a new way of indexing the web.
It means applying a context to the page or site and qualifying it based on the context.
No longer is Google simply looking for x number of keywords or keyword combinations. It has harnessed the ability to look at what a page means by applying ontological rules to the page content to determine its context.
Now, this may sound far fetched. After all, how can you make a computer, which is used to look for sequences of words or numbers with no deeper interrelationships, understand that there is a deeper meaning. In other words, how to you teach a computer to think?
This is where Applied Semantics comes in. This company has devised a way to apply ontological rules to a web page to determine its context. By applying rules (such as synonymy, anonymity, similarity, relationships and many others) to the content of the page, the software can classify a page (or site) into various groupings, or taxonomies.
Now, I know you are saying “wait a computer can’t think. Not only that, but if it could it would have to have incredible processing power, or work extremely slow.”
This is where Kaltix comes in. Kaltix is a company which was formed by Google employees to improve the calculation of PageRank by making it faster. At least that’s what the press release said.
So, if you combine the speed harnessing abilities of Kaltix with the “understanding” of Applied Semantics what do you have? A very fast, very smart search engine.
And guess what? Google owns them both. Do you see where I’m going here?
If not, let me clarify. Google purchased Applied Semantics back in April this year. I would guess that they’ve had their eye out for something like this company for some time. They have been looking at improving results for a year or more now. Ever since people learned how to manipulate PageRank.
But they soon found, likely in May, that the Applied Semantic software wasn’t as efficient as they would have liked. It was at this time we noticed a slight change in the SERPs pages after a deep crawl.
So they went on a hunt, looking for someone to make it faster. And they found Kaltix. Remember Kaltix developed a way to make the PageRank algorithm faster. Well why couldn’t they apply the Kaltix technology to the Applied Semantics ontology software? After all PageRank is an algorithm, and so is the ontology software (albeit likely much more complex). In September, the Kaltix deal closed and Google now has the ability and speed it needs to take the next step.
Remember what Larry Page said about the perfect search engine? “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” (From the corporate section of the Google website – http://www.google.com/corporate/today.html).
The key words here are “understand” and “give back exactly what you want.” Now remember what ontology is. Ontology is used to capture the core relationships between concepts supporting the characterization of text in terms of meanings. In other words, understanding what a body of content is about.
Larry Page wants a search engine that understands and Applied Semantics has software which does just that.
So what’s next? Now that Google has a search engine that thinks can things get better? Well if you have been watching the recent Florida update news, you will know that in many cases, Google results appear to have actually gotten worse since that day in November. At least in some peoples eyes. So I guess now is the time to point out that according to Applied Semantics’ website (which, by the way, was recently changed to exclude most of the information I am sharing with you today � more proof?) the software is designed to learn. It can understand when the wrong results are displayed (by monitoring what results are chosen) and it can adapt.
Therefore, one would assume that search results should get better over time. How long will that be? No one can tell, but I would think it should not take more than a few months.
In the end, despite the short term pains, I guess change is a good thing.
Author Bio:
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning Specialists
