Google To Understand Entities

A Mashable story has details from Google's head of search, Amit Singhal on where Google search is heading.

Here are two excerpts from the article:

The future of Google Search, though, could be a very different story. In an extensive conversation, Singhal, who has been in the search field for 20 years, outlined a developing vision for search that takes it beyond mere words and into the world of entities, attributes and the relationship between those entities. In other words, Google’s future search engine will not only understand your lake question but know a lake is a body of water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and even salinities for each lake.

Google now wants to transform words that appear on a page into entities that mean something and have related attributes. It’s what the human brain does naturally, but for computers, it’s known as Artificial Intelligence.

It’s a challenging task, but the work has already begun. Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal.

See that last line?

Amit said, Google is "building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities."

For an SEO and search fan, this is a big thrill. Tedster from WebmasterWorld said:

I'd say this is the long-term view of where Google is headed - or really, where search is headed altogether. We left the world of pure text match years ago, but not by a lot so far.

It's definitely something to keep in mind as we try to make sense of the way SERPs are evolving. Right now, experienced searchers might not even formulate a search such as "the ten deepest lakes in the US" but would probably come at this idea from related searches that stand a better chance of finding a text match - and then go on from that initial set of findings.

The article states "while 200 million entities is a lot, the world of knowledge is vast." Indeed. Given all the possibilities that a true AI would need to address, 200 million entities is a mere sneeze.

This is a whole new game.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image credit to ShutterStock.