It appears that Google has started showing answers to particular questions in it natural search results, suggesting they have introduced semantic processing in their algorithm.
The results appear above natural results and as this ReadWriteWeb article has pointed out, some of the search queries that trigger results include “what is the capital city of oregon?”, “who was marlene dietrich’s husband?” and “britney spears mother”. Rather than displaying standard search results, Google in some cases now shows an answer directly to the question, as seen in the screenshot below.
This doesn’t appear to be a test either – the results are available universally and not just on particular data centres.
Google isn’t always getting its results quite right though – the screenshot below shows a search for “what is the capital city of morocco”, to which Google shows co-ordinates rather than the city name Rabat.
ReadWriteWeb argue that the results may not be processed semantically, and that the results may be derived from “trusted sources”, and the results could even have been generated manually. The screenshot below shows no semantic result for the query “who shot john lennon”, which you could assume would be relatively straight forward to generate such a result for.
The key seems to be the “According to: …” line displayed underneath the result and the “more sources” link next to that. Can Google understand the semantics of these sources, has a human produced the results based on these sources, or are other sources being use to produce the semantic results?
Whatever the answers, I’m sure more will become apparent in the coming weeks. This does show that Google are focused on providing some sort of semantic results and we should expect to see more from this sooner or later. The same applies to Microsoft, who have already tested semantic results following their acquisition of semantic search engine Powerset in 2008.
This could have big repercussions for search. Providing results in such a way means that users would no longer need to click on search results to find answers which could be particularly damaging for reference sites, as traffic volumes would be affected. It also takes us down the path of search engines being able to understand the full context of what we are searching for, and displaying fully relevant results accordingly. On the flipside, if the search engines get the answers wrong based on poor sources, a lot of misinformation could be spread.