Along with the cool google search timeline above google made semantic search official on its 15th birthday.

In celebration of its 15th birthday, google put up a must read blog post with many interesting announcements: “Fifteen years on—and we’re just getting started” – among them (if you read between the lines) the official unveiling of semantic search. this of course took me down the road of what this means for the bigger picture of search:

Semantic Search.

personally i believe semantic search, or as i like to think of if ‘contextual search’ is finally here. for the last year i’ve always said that contextual search is the future, but now thanks to google’s announcement it’s officially here after “conversational search” went live for chrome earlier this year.

My take on the future of search.

just a quick refresher to all of those that haven’t heard my three pillars that make up the future of search:

    1. Context – with this announcement it’s now clear that contextual search is finally here and will only grow in importance. google’s knowledge graph was the first step, but now it should finally will impact all searches.
    2. Content – thanks to the animal updates from google (panda & penguin) we all know how much more weight is put on “good & quality” content.
    3. Social – no matter what i may think, social signals are increasingly important. there are more and more indicators each day: from google including hashtags in search, to google’s caffeine update in 2010 that brought real-time tweets onto the the results page, to personalized results page, and to

The future is here.

Of the three above components only semantic / contextual search was missing from my ‘future of search trifecta’. well, now that it has officially arrived the future of search and seo is here and it is beautiful. we will see more relevant results, less spammers, fewer black-hat seos, and people will actually find what they are searching for much faster. and so and they lived happily ever after. the end.

I wish i could have ended the story there, but one thing i’ve learned is that the digital world and seo in particular are always changing. just when you think you’ve figured something out it changes – so stay tuned and (if you’re anything like me) enjoy the ride.