Making sense of the web

Can Applied Semantics help Google make sense of the web?

• To make sense of the web, Google needs to find meaning in web pages. Applied Semantics has helped...

On St. George's Day (April 23rd), 2003 Google announced the acquisition of Applied Semantics inc. It has provided the lance that has slain the dragon of meaningless spam advertising.

Applied Semantics are experts in semantic text processing and online advertising, This acquisition was the spur for Google to create new technologies that make online advertising more useful to users, publishers, and advertisers. At the time of writing, Nov. 2006, it has born fruit in the Google AdSense program. This is now delivering highly relevant advertisements to web pages and is creating vast profits for Google. For instance, Google is predicted to overtake the UK's main commercial TV channels in terms of advertising revenue. Google's 2006 UK revenues are expected to surpass Channel Four's predicted £800m.

Applied Semantics' software is based on CIRCA technology, which understands, organizes, and extracts knowledge from websites in a way that hopes to mimic human thought processes. A key application of the CIRCA technology is Applied Semantics AdSense, now Google AdSense. This helps to provide understanding of key themes on web pages, making the delivery of highly relevant and targeted advertisements straightforward.

As semantic technology makes stronger contributions to web search, today's SEO practices are likely to becomes redundant. Because semantic technology "understands" ideas, SEO experts will need to optimize for ideas. Optimizing for ideas is much more difficult than optimizing for keywords.  Reputable sites on a given topic are likely to begin beating lower-quality sites with good keyword-optimization. So the only way to win this search engine war is to fill your site with good ideas. 

But, for the foreseeable future, keyword optimization will still have some importance. The only way to to do well overall will be to optimize for keywords and ideas.

The likely losers are low quality sites that bottom feed for long phrases like "short red widgets in Brazil" without creating lots of content full of good ideas. They are likely to be beaten out by high quality sites that might mention "short red widgets" and "Brazil", but not the longer phrase. Semantic technology will connect the shorter phrases and, after assessing the general quality of ideas on each site, will make the appropriate choice.

In summary, you should spend most of your time making sure that your site is of a higher quality than other sites covering the same topic. Ideally, to win, it should contain more good ideas on the topic under consideration than any other site. Other quality considerations, like writing style and site structure, also need to be taken into account. Only after all these "human and semantic technology friendly" factors have been maximised should you look at improving your keywords. And you should only add keywords if they do not detract from the quality of the site.