It has been over 10 years! A good decade since Google emerged onto the scene and the contributions they have made online has been endless. But even with all the advancements they have made they are still no match for how our brains think and search for answers to problems or questions. When we search for something we look for things that are related; we look for things we know of; and we search along the lines of associated networks in our experience. My dad, being a doctor and never involved in SEO, refers to this as associative search because we search along networks of associations between things. Strangely he figures that's just how they came up with search engines and I guess he is right.

There is a term that caught my attention when I was looking at how the human search is associative. The term is "homing in". Homing in is defined as… "recalling a previously experienced item by thinking of something that is linked with it, thus invoking the association". Have you ever wondered how when we can't remember someone's name, it suddenly pops into your brain a few minutes later? How do we recall it? Let me explain… When you are trying to think of that person's name, our brain starts by remembering some associated memories about that person. By doing so our mind begins the process of networking between the various things we recall and begins to associate these memories together and in the end the name pops out when it forms the associated link. As you can see our minds tend to look for items that are associatively connected to things we remember.

With the ever increasing number of users and the intensive growth of the internet will keyword research be sufficient enough to try and form these associated links to drive relevant traffic to your website? A huge amount of information is added to the internet daily and search engines need to index it all in order to maintain keyword relevance. At a certain point, with billions and billions of Web pages to sift through, keyword search just won't cut it anymore. It's a needle-in-the-haystack problem. Will keyword search be able to match this demand? Let me introduce Nova Spivack to you, who is the CEO of semantic search startup Radar Networks. Spivack believes the solution to the problem lies in semantic search.

What is semantic search or if you do prefer semantic web? Wikipedia defines Semantic Search or Semantic Web as the evolving process of taking all the content on the world wide web and "expressing it not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily." Semantic search not only understands the meaning of items but also the connections between them. It aims to get past the barrier of keyword search which may have reached its limit.

Can you see how this works quite closely in comparison with our own brains? Lets look at a few interesting reasons why semantic web is a better option:

1. Much higher precision as a result of matching meaning to meaning instead of keywords to keywords.

2. Much higher recall as a result of matching on equivalent meanings that are expressed in different ways.

3. Better ranking where the pagerank and existing methods are combine with semantic data

4. Better and more natural mechanisms to create more complex and accurate queries

I read an article by Erik Collier where he gave a very good example of how semantic search works:

"The burden is on the user to think the way the engine wants them to think. If the meaning of the query is the same, you should get the same results no matter how you phrase your question. The semantic web will understand your intent and give you the answer based on your intent, not based on the exact arrangement of your keywords.

To see examples of how query phrasing and word selection affects the outcome of results, search Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, Powerset and Hakia with the following queries and note the differences in the results:

What is the population size of Japan?

What is the population of Japan?"

The future is here! Semantic web has arrived and recently Microsoft endorsed semantic web when they purchased Powerset which is one of the top 10 semantic search engines on the web today. Here are a few others to get you started in the world of semantic searching:

1. Kngine - search results are divided into either web results, or image results. They are preceded by information about the search term, known as 'Concepts.'
2. Hakia - search results are divided into Web, News, Blogs, Twitter, Image and Video, and can be re-listed according to relevance or date.
3. Kosmix - search results they are divided into Video, Web, News & Blogs, Images, Forums, Twitter, Amazon and Facebook
4. Powerset - focuses on doing only one thing - and doing it really well. All search results on Powerset come from Wikipedia, making it the ultimate way to search Wikipedia, using semantics
5. Evri - Search results can be filtered into Articles, Quotes, Images and Tweets, and can also be shared on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace

So, where does SEO go from here? What happens to the quest of requesting back-links and our link building efforts using keywords? Are you as ready as I am to explore the world of semantic search? Search behaviour does change a user's online experience, so come into this new world and let semantic web change your life.