Since the WSJ announcement in March 2012 of Google’s move into Semantic Search, the web has been curiously quiet about what this announcement means for the future of information access on the Internet, which is surprising since the implications are considerable for Google, for search engines, and for the future of Information Portals on the world wide web.
Since Google’s acquisition of Metaweb in 2010, the search giant has been moving rapidly to build out a ‘Knowledge Graph’ of 200 million word entities based on Google’s unique understanding of what we search for every day, and where we visit (i.e. a web site) for the result of a search query. Specifically, it looks as though the team from Metaweb was grafted into Google and started snapping together keyword and keyphrase search relationships based on Google’s massive data logs, initially based on 11 million semantic word relationships developed for the Freebase Project. Continue reading