S.e.A.rCh

Google Semantic Search & Orion Update

Long time no see.  I had my first snowboarding 3 weeks ago, and I’ve just found it quite difficult to get back into blogging on my return.  I’ve also become addicted to Tweeting, so it feels like I’m much more likely to spend my time commenting there than here.  Anyone wanting to follow me, you can find my profile here.

So Google have been busy beavering away lately.  First they rolled out “Vince’s Change” in the US (it’s yet to hit Europe apparently), then they rolled out the “Orion Update” that saw changes to SERPs last mid-last week, and then on Friday they started testing the Google Wonder Wheel.  And all this just as I was starting to feel there wasn’t much happening in the world of search at the moment.

While each of their changes are interesting in their own right (my personal favourite is the Wonder Wheel), it seems like the Orion Update is the one that’s caught everyone’s attention – I’ve had questions coming from numerous sources asking me how this will shape the future of the internet, as if it’s ground breaking new technology that will change the way we search.

The Orion Update is named after the Orion Search Engine, developed by Ori Allon, which was acquired by Google in 2006.  The search engine was able to return not just content optimised for a given keyword, but also content semantically related to that keyword.  This technology formed a major part of the update, that consisted of two parts:

1. Longer snippet text
2. Showing related search results for wider variety of queries

In terms of longer snippet text, I’m not a big fan of this.  Instead of showing two lines of snippet text to accompany each search result, it’s now choosing to show more if need be – I think I’ve seen up to 5 lines of text in some instances.  This is great for Google – it means they can answer a users query directly from the search results, but will clearly reduce click-throughs to the websites that contain that information.

The related search results for a wider variety of queries is where the “new” semantic technology comes into play.  And this is what really bugs me.  This really isn’t new.  This has been happening for years.  All they’ve done here is expanded the set of terms this is applicable to.  So instead of only seeing this when searching for generic terms (”car insurance“, “loans“), you’ll now see this for more niche queries (”physics particle neutron“).  Sure it’s a great addition to the SERP, and it’ll help users refine queries.  But I don’t think at the moment it’ll radically change search behaviour.

It would be different, however, if they were to incorporate this technology within their core search algorithm.  If, for example, they monitor CTR on these related searches links, it may be possible to pull these related search results through to the initial search result.  For example, currently when you do a search for “helium”, “helium gas” is highlighted as a related search.  If Google know that 90% (or some other equally high percentage) of users are unsatisfied with the first page of result, and subsequently click on the “helium gas” result, then it would make sense to pull some of the “helium gas” results through to the “helium” SERP.

This raises a couple of important issues.  Firstly, what does this mean for 2nd page of Google results.  If searchers are always presented with viable alternatives by Google, then there’s less need to click through to the 2nd page of results.  This would make first page visibility much more important.  Secondly, this would change the strategy that many adopt in terms of optimising onpage content.  If it’s not possible to hit the first page for a query – perhaps it’s too competitive – then maybe the way forward is to look for other less competitive, but semantically related keywords, that could still get your website listed under the more competitive keyword.  Will be interesting to see how this pans out.

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Tags: google, google wonder wheel, orion update, semantic search, vinces change