andrewg - 5:33 am on Apr 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

Like Danny and "RBuzz" I have been following Oingo/ Applied Semantics for several years. Although AS pays its bills with DomainSense and the like, and Google's acquisition was definitely linked to their concern that clickthrough rates on content-targeted ads be maximized, there is much more to semantic technology than just serving ads.

It may sound trite when you hear the examples given by companies like AS when they explain how important "disambiguation" is. But in time, linguistic technologies will make today's keyword-centric technologies look a bit dumb.

I'd link to my two recent efforts to explain this stuff, but as Tara pointed out, the TOS here don't permit it, and I don't feel like cutting and pasting. In any case, good for Google. They admitted they don't know it all.

One thing to watch for down the road: a much better "search term suggestion tool" - at least for advertisers who spend enough with Google.

Wordtracker and the like may also be on the way out as more sophisticated tech of this nature is housed within Google. You have the benefit of lateral thinking married with the real value of real time keyphrase search behavior data from the world's biggest search destination.

I'm sure Steve Harmon's group who led the second round of investment in Applied Semantics are very pleased. Oingo raised $1 million in their first round and had a *very* tough time raising the second round but eventually found backing to the tune of $5.4 million in Oct. 2000. Their investors evidently forced them to move much faster on "applying" the technology to moneymaking schemes like DomainSense. Google, the new sheriff in town, also seems to have more interest in the CIRCA technology's bottom line merits than in its potential to steam up the lab with interesting new ideas about search... at least for the time being.

But longer term, here's what you guys have been missing about this story. As semantic technology begins to make a stronger contribution to web search, SEO as formerly practiced becomes a quaint anachronism. You cannot "optimize" nearly as easy for ideas as you can for keywords. For example, you could keyword-optimize a title really well for a phrase, and find yourself ranking lower than some site which doesn't even contain those exact words anywhere! Let's say that on semantic grounds, those words are counted as matching the search query 81% as well as an exact match could be. At present, the lack of those words on even a high quality site would literally bring it to "0%" on that phrase, so the site wouldn't rank on that phrase no matter how good or topical the site was. Now (and by now I mean a couple-three years from now), clearly reputable sites on a given topic may begin beating out lower-quality "cleverly keyword-optimized" sites even on the keywords they've carefully optimized for and even if those exact keywords don't appear on the higher-quality site.

Applied Semantics aren't the only group doing this, of course. It's the wave of the future. Google will have plenty of cash, and could apply a second group like them, if they felt it was important enough.

Could it also be that Mike Grehan will someday have to take back his claim that search engines do not consider "themes"?

Stay tuned... for at least a couple of years... for the answer.