Aaron Bradley dropping some Local knowledge, along with a lot of other knowledge, in his fantastic post about the Semantic Web:

“…search is no longer about words, but about the things to which the words on a web page describe and make reference…”

“Why is this important?  It’s important because when Google receives a user query it’s increasingly not trying to provide a match for the query keywords, but (informed, whenever it’s possible for them to do, by the context of the query) to understand the meaning underlying the query, and then return information about the entities it has identified.”

“The process of navigating to web pages, and moving back and forth between search results and the web pages they reference, is trivial on desktop computers but a royal pain on a hand-held mobile device.

This situation provides a compelling incentive for the search engines to circumvent additional web page visits altogether, and instead present answers to queries – especially straightforward informational queries – directly in the search results.

While many in the search marketing field have suggested that the search engines have increasingly introduced direct answers in the search results to rob publishers of clicks, there’s more than a trivial case to be made that this is in the best interest of mobile users.  Is it really a good thing to compel an iPhone user to browse to a web page – which may or may not be optimized for mobile – and wait for it to load in order to learn the height of the Eiffel Tower?

This also sheds considerable light on the usability impetuous behind Google+ Local.   A well-formed Google+ Local Page enables Google to display things like business hours and an interactive map in a mobile-friendly fashion in response to a query like “Jones Aquarium Supplies” (which is, of course, an entity).”

 

 

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3 Response Comments

  • Mike Bunnell  June 18, 2013 at 12:33 pm

    Damn autocorrect…

  • Andrew Shotland  June 18, 2013 at 12:50 pm

    Was wondering if anyone would pick up on that one 🙂

  • Sean Elstins  June 20, 2013 at 5:56 pm

    I love the forward thinking that Google is attempting but they are now trying to completely disassociate themselves from the other search engines. Which for the content creator or webmaster you almost have to decide which search engine(s) to market for. Bing, Yahoo, Ask ,Etc. or the Big G.

    Also Google needs a reality check when it comes to being the best, Google places still needs work and is getting better everyday but in no means is the best.