What is semantic search: A deep dive into entity-based search - Search Engine Land

Since 2013, Google has been gradually developing into a 100% semantic search engine.

What exactly is semantic search? You can find plenty of explanations when you search Google for an answer to that question – but most of those are imprecise and create misunderstandings.

This article will help you comprehensively understand what semantic search is.

Google’s road to becoming a semantic search engine

Google’s efforts to develop a semantic search engine can be traced back to 1999 (as seen in this post by the late Bill Slawski). This became more concrete with the introduction of the Knowledge Graph in 2012 and the fundamental change in its ranking algorithm in 2013 (popularly known as Hummingbird).

All other major innovations such as RankBrain, E-A-T, BERT and MUM either directly or indirectly support the goal to become a fully semantic search engine.

By introducing natural language processing (NLP) to search, Google is moving at an exponential rate toward this goal.

Hummingbird: ‘Not strings, but things’ = entities

Hummingbird is the starting signal of Google’s evolution into a semantic search engine.

It was the biggest search query processing and ranking change ever made by Google, affecting over 90% of all searches as early as 2013. Hummingbird fundamentally replaced much of the existing ranking algorithms.

Through Hummingbird, Google was immediately able to include entities recorded in the Knowledge Graph for query processing, ranking and the output of SERPs.

An entity...

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